The Travelers
by NatShinigami
Summary: "Good God guys! Could anyone of you tell me where the hell am I? And what about the dinosaurs? Has Jurasic Park actually came true? And most of all, why in the seventh hell am I in a weird blue woman body!" And that was just the beginning of their nightmare. Bad summary. The dramatic story of some time-traveller adventurers - with a little bit of romance trown into it.
1. Chapter 1 - Malcolm 1

Ok, I shouldn't be doing this, mostly because I'm going on vacations today but what the hell? Never had I had a semi-humorous chapter that went so smoothly out of my mind.

This story occurs in an AU where the Reapers don't exist. Commander Shepard will appear though, and so most of our beloved Normandy's crew. Also this is my first attempt of fanfiction in English that sees the light, so if you see any mistake or could point me towards something in my speech that could be improved please let me know.

I'll try to make the next chapters more interesting, can't promise anything though, once created the characters usually grow a mind of their own, _even the ones that doesn't belong to me!_

 **.** Mass Effect and everything within it belongs to Bioware, however the OCs and the plot are my own.

Enjoy the reading!

* * *

 **The Travelers**

 **Chapter One: Rude awakening**

 **Malcom 1**

* * *

He awoke out of the blue with the feeling of his back _not_ comfortably resting against his soft mattress.

It wasn't the first time in his life when he woke up on the floor, nor the first time he felt like someone had beaten the shit out of him – it was his usual hangover after a good night of party –, but it was the first time his senses felt actually _numbed_ and his body was not answering his commands of actually wake up and find something to dull his headache. He just saw blurred forms instead of things and the surface on his back was the only solid thing he could pinpoint with his senses out.

He closed his eyes, waiting for them to recover if he just lied there a little before actually trying to get up. That went partially well, his body still sore and numb but it was _moving_ at least. He sighed when he stood in a sitting position, and brought his hands to his face to rub his face, his hand felt a little too delicate but they had never been rude for a start so he didn't care if his friends had decided to get him a manicure.

It was when her hands trailed up to his hair when it all went to hell: there was _no_ hair and his scalp seemed to have changed in form and texture from day to night.

Thinking that it was all a crazy machination he opened his eyes. Little time had he to relieve in the fact that now he could see properly.

His hands were blue, and… were _actually_ boobs the things in his chest?

The morning just kept going better and better.

He looked around him, looking for some of his friend to yell at them and obtain a goddam answer on why his skin was blue, his new boobs and his hair, but the scenery around him just took the breath away from him in the form of a sentence.

"You've got to be shitting me!"

He was sitting in the grey concrete floor of some kind of cell, and while that may had been reassuring in some weird and sick way – it wouldn't be his first morning in a cell after a party –, the two unconscious _fucking dinosaurs_ in the cell had broken every pretension of normality he could had had. Also his voice was that of a female – why in the nine circles of hell had he a feminine voice?!

He just knew one thing for sure: whoever had done this to him, was going to die regretting it.

* * *

He lost the account of time after checking his body and find out that he was _actually_ in a female body, but that wasn't even the worst of it: his ears were gone, his skin either was painted with a water-resistant paint or was blue for real and his scalp prolonged into a weird crown of _tentacles_. And after touching them, _feeling_ them, he was pretty sure that it wasn't a fake.

On the record this has already been marked as the weirdest day in his whole life.

He tried to put his mind at ease singing some good ol' rock song, while playing with the edge the _tunic_ that covered otherwise his body – he would be found dead before admitting he was wearing a dress –, but nothing seemed to work so he started to examine his cellmates.

The smaller one was pretty dinosaur-like, with long and lithe scaly limbs and theropod feet. It was completely naked but there was no way for him to guess if it was a he or a she. The scales were of deep ebony with a metallic glint to them, and the skin between them was few tones lighter. It's most impressive feature however, spurs, weird mouth and claws aside, was the fact that it had only three fingers. He didn't knew why, but that had been what had struck him harder about the creature: despite its general humanoid shape, that _thing_ was not a human.

The other subject was bigger, a lot bigger that any of them. It seemed to be a bigger – and scarier – brown Ninja Turtle, it didn't help to soothe is mind the fact that the bulky beast just wore a loincloth. It had a weird head; it seemed too big for that body, and some strange carapace in its back. Now that he thought about it, the other thing also had some kind of carapace. Maybe they were the same species? But no, this other thing had four fingers in its feet while the other one just had two, and their legs and arms were constructed far too different to belong to the same species: sexual dimorphism was weird sometimes, but he had never seen it _that_ weird. Its scales were a brownish grey with no glint, but its forehead wore a dark green plate that reminds him even more of a Ninja Turtle.

A noise that seemed to come from outside caught his attention and it wasn't long before one of the metallic walls seemed to open to let a pair of people come in.

 _Thanks God!_ He thought before he smiled to the men and spoke with the clear-as-water, smooth-like-silk feminine voice that was already started to hate.

"Good god guys! Could anyone of you tell me where the hell am I? And what about the dinosaurs? Has Jurasic Park actually came true? And most of all, why in the seventh hell am I in a weird blue woman body?!"

His light and sarcastic tone was perfectly hiding his nervousness and fear. He didn't liked this situation at all, and the gun that one of the men had reached when the talked was making him rethink his intelligence at not playing the dead like and animal does to deceive a predator. He couldn't stand against them if he could not move alright yet.

The unarmed guy advanced, and he then saw the lab coat he wore. His gut yelled that that was a bad signal, recalling him of every mad scientists movies he has seen since he was a child. He thought the other man was going to poke him, take blood samples or something else, but instead he gave him a self-satisfied smile before letting a trey with three food containers and three glasses filled with water.

"Good to see one of you is awake, I was starting to hate being on feeding duty of you all. Glad to see that you speak out language, asari, that will make things easier" He signaled the container in the middle, marked with a red ex "This one, is for the girl over there" said pointing to the lithe dinosaur "the others are for you and your pal"

The man stood and turned to go, but he realized that none of his questions had been answered.

"Hey, you can't let me here! My lawyer is gonna know of you and soon your mad scientist career will be the last of your concerns!"

The man just chucked and started to talk with the soldier before closing the door behind him. At least now he knew he was an asari – whatever in hell that were – and that the small one was a female.

Still, he ate the weirdest food of his life – a purple steak – in complete silence, trying to figure out how many drinks had had the last night to induce this hallucination.

* * *

He didn't know how much time had passed when he woke to the sound of something big moving. His eyes opened to see the Ninja Turtle trying to put its arms under its body and try to lift its impressive mass from the floor.

It wasn't working. The thing was trying to fold its arms in a way that didn't seem possible for its species, and he was pretty sure that it would end up hurting itself if left on its own.

With a courage that he didn't really feel, he stood against the wall with his new, thinner legs and limped to the beast using the wall for support. Once he was near enough he extended a trembling hand and caressed its carapace with a touch that he hoped was soothing.

"Easy there buddy, this bodies doesn't seem to be used to move and if I have problems I don't even want to think what would be for me if I was a heavy tank like you"

A grow-like sound left the creature's mouth, but it seemed to understand and with his poor help it was soon in a sitting position against the wall, looking around with big amber scared eyes. The beast seemed as surprised and unsettled by this situation has he had been. He went to look for the food and when he came back he looked that it was looking at its arms with obvious panic while flexing his three fingers awkwardly.

"Here, some mad scientist let some food for us. Can you speak? Were you human too? Can you remember how you ended up here?"

Ninja Turtle had a clear understanding of his words, because it opened its mouth and moved it like to speak and answer, but from it scaly lips came no sound more than a scared squeak. He soothed the creature with some calm non-worded sounds, and then, when it had had a gulp of water, he asked again.

"Are you human?"

With the big scared eyes that were unsettling against its strong frame, it moved its head in a nod. He couldn't help but to smile.

"I'm too, human I mean, and a man despite my appearance. I woke up here as you just did not knowing where the hell I was. I can speak, but that maybe is because I had human lips. Are you a man or a woman?"

It tried to vocalize again, but then resigned and just held up a finger.

"So you are a he. Do you have a name?"

There was no need for words as the newly found male told him with his gaze to go fuck himself before centering on his food and try to ignore him. He just smiled and kept talking.

"Well, you will need a name. I'm not calling you Ninja Turtle forever… maybe Rafael?" The gaze was a murderous one this time, and he held his blue hands up "Okay, okay. Then I'll just call you Tank. I'm Malcom by the way, and how would you like to call the spikey dinosaur of a lady over there?" A growl was his answer "Yeah, I think Spikey will do"

He saw Tank roll his eyes and he couldn't help but laugh. It was going to be a long way out of hell, but at least now he wasn't alone.

* * *

They stood there for an unknown quantity of time, he asking yes-no questions and Tank answering or trying to talk with gestures that were not well translated because of his alien form. When the other figure in the room started to stir and move in her sleep, they both hauled themselves near of the other's lithe frame.

The sound of her groans were weird, her voice was feminine indeed almost as soft pitched as Malcom's new one, but rude in a way that reminded him more of Tank than of a human woman. It also had a double quality, like if there were two people groaning simultaneously instead of one. It also seemed to resonate in her chest before getting out.

It was unsetting at least, but never more than the yellow avian eyes that met his gaze when the strange creature opened them.

She emitted a weird screech before starting to blink furiously and that remind him of his own awakening and numbed senses, Tank hadn't had problems with that though. But even with her unsteady gaze she still tried to move with desperation that none of them hadn't expected.

He got near of her as he had done with his bulky friend before, and lend a soothing caress to the top of her head, that was free of the spikes that decorated its sides.

"Everything's alright princess, just a rude awakening in a body that doesn't seems to belong to you. Just the usual after a hangover"

She went still after that, and a rumbling chuckle accompanied by a weird sound he barely heard became the only sound that grazed the room. It soon changed into a hysterical roar of laughter, and even with the woman's weird vocals he could trace two emotions: joy and desperation.

When he tried to calm her again with a caress she stopped and tried to intersect his hand with one of her clawed ones – she didn't seemed to notice that fact though –, but her body was as irresponsible as theirs were and she gave up soon enough with them at the sight of her own hands. He decided to bring her food while she examined herself.

"So, I've been told you're a woman. Are you human?" Her eyes seemed to scream that he was very stupid and Tank just chucked at the scene while he left the food and the water at her feet before lifting his hands in defeat "Just sayin' babe, seems like I'm the only one this bastards had changed his sex"

Her head turned to the side out of curiosity and he couldn't help but remember his dog growing up and his tendency to do that gesture everytime he spoke to him. Still, it was quite impressive the fact that she was having more success communicating with corporal language that Tank, maybe it was because she was a female?

He sighed at her obvious question.

"I don't know what happened and I'm still clinging to the chance that this is a sick trick my pals pull into me. I'll try to get answers from the mad scientist when he comes back, but don't expect much"

After that the room went silent. He stood against the wall and did some stretching exercises while Tank tried to get his legs to work and Spikey tried to dink her water without it seeping in the open sides of her mouth, the things around it baring her strange mandibles and her sharp teeth.

When it became obvious that none of them was accomplishing their task today, they made a strategy circle, where with their growls and his words they decided to take watches while the other two slept, and the order of it.

So he went to sleep as well as the Ninja Turtle while Spikey mounted guard above them. The hard day caught up with him pretty soon, and he drifted into a dreamless sleep before he could register the harness of the concrete under his new too-soft body.


	2. Chapter 2 - Keenan 1

Finally more that fifteen days after the beginning of this, the second chapter is up. I had it ready since the third day of my vacation, but it had been written on a tablet without internet connection and was full of typo mistakes. Then I came back home and was with fever while trying to pass it to a word in my computer so things didn't go as expected.

It felt great to see that almost a hundred people had read it, and that it already had favorites! Thank you so much for giving a chance to this unconventional adventure! Also, thanks to kingslops for leaving review!

\- Bioware owns everything but the OCs and the plot.

Enjoy the reading!

* * *

 **The Travelers**

 **Chapter Two: Learning to survive**

 **Keenan 1**

* * *

Malcolm woke him up for his guard duty after his own shift. He was completely rested, even I he didn't know how much he had slept.

His body seemed more responsive after a natural, non-drugs-induced sleep, and his legs were far steadier than before. His bulky form seemed to be less and less awkward every passing second but his stomach now was reclaiming food and an unknown part of him wanted to charge again something, create a way out and get the hell out of that place.

He needed to recover his communication skills and use them if he wanted to stay sane against that primitive part of him.

He started by exercising his huge mouth, trying to get the muscles used to the movements required for human languages and speech, while he also limbered his legs up, getting them ready to try to stood and walk.

When he felt confident enough with his trunk-like legs, he used the wall to steady himself and finally found his gravity center and equilibrium. He was walking his first steps in this form when the cell door suddenly opened and four men with something similar to assault rifles came in, followed closely by a man in lab coat that could or couldn't be the same one that Malcolm had met the previous day. He kept his position against the wall, but made sure that he stood between those men and his partners asleep in the corner… only that they weren't sleeping anymore. The faint double-toned growl of the woman – Spikey – preceded the other female voice's humorous sleepy groan.

"Tank? It's still early to start punching things, don't you think?"

When the blue person raised his head from his arms and saw the armed men, tried to stand as fast as he could with the sleep clinging to his mind and a body that, despite its similarity to the human one, was still alien to him and not fully under his control.

Suddenly two men ran and pinned him to the wall he had used for stability, in the next few seconds he saw another man ran to Spikey and ben her arms behind her back in a way that tore a pained shrill from her throat. The armed man left took Malcolm's wrists and forced him to walk through the door between angry screams and scary eyes. They let his dinosaur-like friend go first and after the scientist let another tray, this time with food and water for just two people, his own captors shoved him to the floor before running out of the cell and close the door behind them.

Both, Spikey and himself kept their positions for a few seconds, catching their breaths and waiting for the adrenaline – or whatever was the equivalent of their new bodies – to subdue, before even daring to try to figure out what the hell had just happened. In a matter of seconds their number had been downed to two, and none of them could talk to the other or express the theories that came to their mind.

He stood first, using once again the wall to help him, and started to walk to the tray, thinking that at least he could fix his hunger while he thought. A faint growl from his now only cellmate made him turn his gaze back to her.

She pointed to the tray with a long finger ended in a long black claw that reminded him of eagles' talons; she pointed the same finger to her strange mouth and pretended to chew something, and them she mimicked as well as she could a person dying. He laughed hysterically for a bit at the sight of her body stretched on the floor with her long blue tongue out of her mandibles, but when her eyes met his again he just did his best attempt of a shrug in his new body. If they wanted to survive they would have to risk the chance of being drugged or poisoned: they needed that food, as simple as that.

They ate in silence, everyone lost in their own thoughts before moving and finding a way to pass the hours.

Spikey still had her water ration from yesterday mostly full, she hadn't yet found a way to drink it safely so while he exercised his body a little more, she gave her full attention to the mobile plates at the sides of her mouth and tried to found a position in which they covered the holes between her upper and lower mandibles and allowed her to retain the water long enough for it to fall in her drying throat.

She had succeeded on drinking a little when the door opened again and from the outside someone threw in Malcolm's limp body on the cell floor. Immediately, even before the door could be closed, his partner and he had started to drag their bodies near their other acquaintance.

The man's deep blue skin was bruised and from some injuries in his arms flowed thin lines of purple blood. The skin of his wrists was raw and near its breaking point, with marks that signaled restrictions, and around his delicate neck there was some kind of high tech iron collar, with needles deeply buried in the skin. They shared a worried look and planed with hand signs and growls how to carry their partner to the safest point in the cell and how they were going to protect him.

The fury growing within him was getting harder to control, and he was afraid that if he didn't find a solution to his problem soon, he was going to do something he was going to regret. He decided to practice his vocalizations with more perseverance this time, and soon the silence filled the room while both of them turned to their own business while looking after their fallen comrade.

* * *

Malcolm awoke with a start and a half drowned scream, no longer after they had finished eating. He had relaxed at the sight of them both and accepted the water the woman gave him, even despite his shaking hands.

The fierce protectiveness both of them showed, along with his reassuring looks and her soothing vocalizations seemed to calm the blue one enough to start to tell them something.

"I… I don't know why they're doin' this to us. Why… What they're expecting to get… I tried, I told them that we're as humans as they're but… but they just laughed on my face, told me to shut up and… and…"

Tank caressed his back with highly controlled strength, knowing that the thing his friend needed less when he was about to have a nervous breakdown, was for him to fly off the handle and start crushing walls. When he made sure to be in Malcolm's visual range, he moved his giant head on denial. And when his green eyes moved to the other form at his side, they both could hear her vocal growl turn deeper and calming, her eyes harder than Tank ones but with equal truth and resolve in their depths.

A swell of primitive pride interrupted his thoughts out of the blue, filling his body with strength and his mind with a power that wasn't there a second before. And Tank, for the first time in his life gave up consciously to instinct, opened his mouth and let the words flow out of it, unsteady and weird-sounding but full and in order.

"I… My name is Keenan Sokolov, I work for the UN and I swear to God, that whoever is doing this will soon need a DNA test to know who he was"

He didn't know where the threat had come from, but he knew it true the second it left his lips. His expression grew colder and his joy at being able to communicate was soon run over by a hot, blinding rage, negative feelings and recent unpleasant memories. His voice was rougher this time with the words almost lost in a growl.

"I'm going to find them and force them to give us our bodies back and them I'm gonna open their chests with my bare hands, rip their…" The paleness in Malcolm's face stopped his rant.

What the hell was he doing?! He was a diplomat of all things, someone that had sworn himself to make of this world a better one the only way it would be alright with his principles and ways of living: though speech, debate and dialogue. And now after barely a week in this hellhole he was founding himself thinking about death and destruction with an almost feral drive to rip apart those who dared to stood against his will. He breathed slowly, trying to thin of happier times back in his natal Italy: the summer sun of the twilight diving on the bluest sea of the world, the traditional familiar vacation with his father's family on Moscow, the first time he had set foot on Geneva, his degree in New York… He felt some resemblance of normality coming back to his mind followed by a wave of relief because despite everything happening he was the same Keenan that thought ill of using violence as a way to resolve conflicts, of letting you be driven by things as unreasonable as instincts.

Feeling his distress his partners that had been left behind in his rant, came by his side with either no fear or with a great amount of courage. Spiky's hand was the first that clasped his shoulder, with a strength that one would never guess from her slim frame, but it was Malcolm's full of emotions, shaky voice the one that made clear the fact: they trusted him.

"I really hope you kill those bastards, but that would be Tank's task to fulfill, not Keenan's. Let's just focus ourselves in training and make sure that things like this doesn't happen anymore to no one of us"

The woman's keen rumble followed the words, and he dared to turn his scaly lips up in a tentative smile.

We can do this, were his thoughts, we have to do this.

He stood on his legs, not as stable as he wished he would be but better than before, and feeling that if – just this time – he let the instinctual part of him act, everything would be better and faster.

They had many long days ahead, and many objectives to achieve in the shortest time possible.

* * *

After two sleep turns and another meal with no signals of new abductions, they started to proactively help each other.

His legs were steady enough to allow both men a vertical standing without problems. Malcolm could run and make a large variety of human movements, while he just could walk and try to adapt his human movements to his new – if temporal – biology. Spikey had made her vocalizations wider every minute – some of them actually resembling words – and he found out that not only could he identify her emotions from her double voice but also by her scent. Most of the times it could betray her true feelings her new body couldn't, he felt out of place knowing about them so he hadn't said nothing about it and did his best to not pay attention to what his nose keep telling him. She had reached the point when she could stand with her weird two-toed feet with the aid of a nearby wall, but the second she tried to walk her legs would bend in two different places and send her to the ground.

Today they would try another thing before their daily meal; it had been Malcolm's idea, which with his designer eyes had studied everyone's body structure and tried to give them tips to make life easier. He had told him to let his legs bend slightly to keep his gravity center a little bit nearer the floor to make his heavier upper body easier to keep in check, and he had found out that this was working so they were going to try the designer's new theory for the sole woman on their unlikely group: he believed that the only way she could adapt to the new form of her limbs and use them, was if she let her unconscious mind act and recalibrate her brain to find the correct equilibrium points.

So, here they were, both of them crouched at her sides on the middle of the cell, each with one of her arms passing around their waists – had already tried shoulders but his hump was in the middle and wasn't easy to round -, ready to support her weight, paying attention to her word-like sounds that had grew even closer to human language the last hours. They shared a gaze and he nodded to the other man who answered with the same gesture before speaking.

"Ready to go, Spike?"

She made a sound of amusement before agreeing with a nod.

Malcolm and he stood, not slowly but making sure that he stopped at the right height – he had already checked that if he could lift them both of the ground without really trying, even when the scaled one was not precisely feather weight. They stood quiet for half a minute while she changed the positions of her feet at least three times before putting strength on her limbs to find an upright position and nodding once again the signal for them to act.

They started to walk, slow measured steps to allow her trembling blending feet to move without going their own way.

It took them seven long walks through the length of the cell for the scaly one to feel comfortable enough to let her full weight on her alien lower limbs and start to pull her arms out of their grasps. Her first steps on her own were trembling, using her arms to keep the equilibrium and full of hesitation, but when her legs didn't bend sending her to a painful fall, her trust grew and a keen sound left her throat. Barely minutes before they were watching with pride how the dinosaur-like woman walked and tried other things such as short jumps and a slow trot, allowing to herself being as wild and free as a child.

When she ran onto them however, there was nothing remotely resembling human in her expression: the hard plates at the sides of her mouth were spread wide at the sides, giving them a nice view of her sharp teeth in what his mind registered as show of aggressive intentions. With her vocals silent he had to rely on his sense of smell to decipher the situation, and the scents told him that there was not a single bit of violence in her on that moment, just sheer joy. He forced his instincts to recede and relaxed his body, trusting the mechanisms of human brain and social interactions to make Malcolm feel safe, and soon they found themselves being tightly hugged against a hard, rumbling chest.

He laughed with his own rumbling, deep laugh in response to the blue ones soft ones and the double-voiced one of the other, but found himself happier when her laughter became words, the evidence to him that she was as human as they were.

"Thank you boys"

* * *

After that day things seemed to become easier.

Spikey still had it hard with the long sentences, but she was a great addition with her logical, curious mind. She had told them her true name lately the day she had walked for the first time, and it was a pleasant surprise the fact that Malcolm had recognized it: Danielle Sainte was a well-known voice if you were a rock fan. But it had just taken a comment in that direction to turn her happy rumble into a furious, beast-like one, had watched her three fingered hands with anger before taking her meal and walk to a corner to bitch alone. He wasn't sure to understand what happened to her but was sure she was going to explain to them when she wanted to.

Keenan had no time to test that theory though, because after six more watches and meals six armed men and the scientist came again with a tray armed for two, and they all knew what was going to happen.

His instincts kicked in and he let them take over.

He charged with a roar and heard Danielle's double voice in a battle cry quickly followed by a pained human cry and a gun shot, all of this before he reached his target in one of the soldiers that had gone for Malcolm. A high pitched sound filled the room while he felt the man's armor and flesh give under his new raw strength and heard his partners scream in pain while a shot of pure agony filled his nerves and his senses started to numb. He kept fighting even if his skin didn't feel anything at all.

Just before a hit stole from him his consciousness he found himself shocked to the core by the sight of one of the soldiers kicking Danielle away from a blue covered Malcolm, whom was shining with a similar blue light surrounding him until the same man that hit the spikey one hit his forehead with the butt of his rifle.

The resolve of his more violent side in letting a bloodbath in this place before leaving was supported even by his diplomat mind for a second. Then, the darkness ate him.


	3. Chapter 3 - Danielle 1

The end is awkward, I know, but I was halfway through when I finally finished playing Mass Effect 3 and entered into a depressive state that translated into my writing. Besides I cut a scene and it shows in the last armed sentences: things I am used to do in Spanish not always translate well into English.

But the action finally started! Yay! And the next chapters will have more and more of it. We're going to start finding out what happened with the travelers and how they ended up in this situation. Guess who is playing with them?

Bioware owns all but the OCs and the plot.

Enjoy the reading!

* * *

 **The Travelers**

 **Chapter Three: Turning point**

 **Danielle 1**

* * *

She woke up with her head pounding and her body almost irresponsible. Caring, soft hands caressing her forehead.

Danielle didn't wanted to open her eyes but as soon as her brain fog cleared a little, the strong pain in her left side tore a pained murmur from her two vocals. She had had the hope of it all being only a bad dream induced by comma, but the pain felt far too real for it.

The hands stilled for a second and when her eyes opened she found herself resting on Malcolm's lap. The memories of what had happened came back and while her feelings voice expressed her distress, she tried to stand once again to protect the man's delicate fleshy body with her scaled one, not able to tell how many time she had been unconscious nor if the soldiers had left the cell. She didn't make it far before her friend's voice and hands captured her body and pulled it down gently.

"Quiet Spike, don't move. They're gone and Keenan with them, but they won't hurt me. And you… oh, God"

Tears trailed the blue one's cheeks and she made a soothing noise with her vocals while she held her clawed hand up to wipe them out before gathering the strength enough to take a large intake of breath and talk with her ribcage on fire.

"I know I've been shot" She gave a toothy grin and tried to joke with it "It's not the first time and I highly doubt it to be the last. I'll be fine"

This time Malcolm helped her to stand. Had she been human her back would have been drenched in sweat by the moment she let her weight rest on the wall for a moment, but she wasn't and instead of that the building pressure in her head that had been there since she awoke in this body increased. Her head fell on the wall and she had to fight the temptation to close her eyes in favor to check her body.

There was gauze loosely wrapped around her chest, damp with her _blue_ blood. Her right hand claws had dry human blood in them, turned purple on the points where it had mixed with her new own. She felt her stomach turn at the sight and had to close her eyes and breathe deep, trying not to think of the scents her nose captures, to keep her food down. Her voice was tentative and softer than ever when she spoke again.

"How are you Mal? Any injury?"

They had started to cut their names after she had begun to speak, the three of them were long and it sounded too formal or distant to call themselves by them. They didn't need to build more barriers in between that the ones that were already there, so if they were going to escape together, the least they could try to do was to befriend the others in the process.

The man had brought the tray with their meals to her before sitting at her left. His light blue face was paler than ever before, his eyes glassy and his lips trembling as well as his hands; now that he hadn't anything to do the events were catching up. She left her body slide to the floor next to him and held one of her hands to caress one of his, while her vocals turned into a soothing song that seemed almost instinctual near the distressed man. It didn't work this time, and it worried her.

"Malcolm! Answer me, are you alright? Did they hurt you?" He just held his hand to his head and signaled a cut in his scalp that had let a trail of dry purple among her blue blood dry on his skin. That wasn't an answer but was enough for the time being. She kept her voice low while answering "Ok, it's just a cut. It should be alright if we clean it"

She tightened all she could her own bandage on her body before getting up again and looking around for some kind of medical supplies. Malcolm's hand on her own got her attention and when she looked down at him he seemed a bit better. He held his other hand to a red box by the door.

"They let a first-aid kit after realizing that they had shot you, when they were carrying the bodies out"

Something in his voice broke in the last part of the sentence, and that with the words rubbed her the wrong way.

"What do you mean when you say 'the bodies'?"

He pointed again, this time to a large red section on the floor who wasn't there before.

"The men you a Keenan attacked died. Yours bled to death within seconds, and the other resembled more of mashed potatoes than a human being… God, never in my life had I thought I will get to see something like this…"

She had to fight her own shock this time and try to stop the words that the blue one kept saying, blurting out his feeling. Her stomach turned and her headache became stronger, despite her injuries she had to make a run for the only toilet in the room and empty her insides there.

She had murdered a man.

She had just _fucking killed_ another human being!

An awful, screech-like sound left her throat before her stomach rebelled again. Her injury burned now, and she made it worse by pressing her hand on it as strong as she could. The words of her older brother appearing on her mind, the fact that feelings just _didn't helped_ to get out of this kind of situations, just made it worse.

 _They told us the first day_ , he had said, _help you and your team to safety before, and then let the whole emotional crap take over._

The pain helped to get rid of anything but the present out of her mind. She just couldn't think of anything else than the wound and how to get the pain to lessen. Her mind came back enough to remember Malcolm and his own destroyed emotional stability, and she breathed harder before getting up with the aid of the wall behind the toilet and dragging herself to the medicines.

Malcolm's face was paler and his gaze was lost somewhere else, far away from his gassy eyes but his rambling had stopped. The purple blood was flowing again from the open gash in his scalp. She opened the kit and found just a few packs that felt like if they had jelly in them and gauze.

 _So much for keeping us alive_

She took one of the jelly packs and read the instructions, glad to find them on English. The thing was called medigel and it would act as an anesthetic and disinfectant, as well as help the wound to close and heal – surely a military-grade top-secret element. The fact that they had given it to them was a sing that, her knowledge told her, they didn't meant to let them out of here alive but that crashed with the part of her that had studied marketing and told her that the packaging indicated that this was no secret at all. What should she believe?

She pushed her thoughts for later, into the same box that her previous ones and started to clean the wound area with gauze and water before applying the medigel and covering it with more gauze.

Part of the water she used to clean as much blood from their bodies as she could, and after rearranging her own bandage she gave the blue one his food. She wasn't surprised when neither of them ate, the recent events were still too fresh in their minds and even when she reasonably knew that they had to eat she just didn't thought that she could keep it down in her current mental state. The sound that her secondary set of vocal chords insisted on doing on their own didn't helped at all.

They sat there for what had to be hours, just waiting for something. Malcolm finally fell asleep against her warmer body and she followed suit not long after.

Another meal came and went but not even a word about their Keenan, not even when a drowsy Mal dared to stood and ask only to be tossed aside by one of the soldiers, earning a soft threatening growl from her throat.

That day both of them forced themselves to eat, and followed each other everywhere, filling the silence with senseless chat to try to forget what was happening with their lives. They didn't even dared to stood guard alones with their own minds and slept together. She awoke in the middle of their night with her senses in full alert at the sound of the door opening off-hours. She pretended to sleep but abandoned her facade at the sound of something heavy but fleshy hit the floor.

Not even her wound could stop her from standing in her full height within seconds with her mouth plates extended to the sides with a feral hiss passing between her teeth. She paid little to none attention to the closing door and started to walk to the body of her comrade when a black soldier carrying no helmet let his head in and called out to her.

"It'll be better if you wait for him to be awake before getting any closer girl. Krogans aren't known for their sweet character"

Her hiss mixed with a growl and she man closed the door, probably fearing an attack from her.

Keenan was also collared but seemed to be in a better physical condition than Mal had when they had brought him back. There were also strange bracelets around his wrists that shone orange for some weird screens on its sides. She crouched on the floor to inspect him better and found the first injury: a large gash across his left eye, and she was not sure if he had lost it or not as it was closed, but it only fueled her anger – and her always present headache. She found another one on his chest and a last one on his left leg, but they were closing before her eyes with a dashing speed that made her thought on how deep the wounds had really run – and let her wishing that the scars from that didn't translate back to their human bodies when they returned to them. Because they were going to walk as humans again, this nightmare had to end eventually… even if she wasn't sure anymore if they would find themselves the same back there.

Were they even allowed to call themselves _humans_ after what they had done? She couldn't follow that line of thought, or she would lose focus and then there would be no hope.

She caressed Keenan's carapace softly when he moved, and faster than she ever thought possible she found herself thrown across the room by a roaring alien with his amber eyes filled with the fire of anger. He charged and the first image that appeared on her mind was the red mark on the floor before the instinct kicked in and she dodged his attack with a horrible fear shrill. He stood in the wall he had hit instead of her, breathing hard before letting his body go down until his knees were on the floor. She moved to his side, fighting fear and pain and just sat there by his side while she watched Malcolm getting closer to them.

The latter worried gaze distracted her for a few seconds while she started to quit by sheer will force the fear of her vocals and turned them into the shooting song that always calmed the blue one. After many minutes, Keenan finally spoke.

"We are just lab-rats… They… They want to try something on what they had called other species, on what they had turned us. And once they can't learn anything useful from us alive, they are going to kill us and keep using our corpses until rendered useless… I don't get it, this goes against almost every concept in the Human Rights, why… what…" His despair patent in his loss of words, disheartening for the others.

Malcolm, whom had already passed for this nodded, but Danielle didn't.

"We'll found a way out of this…" She started, just to be faced with the bigger man's face, angry as hell.

"Don't you get it? There isn't a way out! We're fucked! Done! _Finito_! There is nothing we could do to get out of this cell! And if by sheer luck we found a way out, we can't go anywhere because we are in the middle of the _fucking space!_ "

For the first time since she had woken as this strange creature, her second vocals that used to express her feelings went silent, her mind as blank as her heart for a second before reason kicked in. Her voice was thick for the sub-vocals and forming the words became harder, her brain wishing to switch to the instinctive and far more familiar sounds of her mother speech.

"It's impossible. There is gravity gluing our feet to the ground, we don't have tech to do that yet. We can't be in space!"

Keenan just seemed to sink in his spot.

"All I saw through the only window I could look was a postal picture way better than the Hubble's and a few things that reminded me of Star Wars spaceships. I talked, screamed, threatened and charged but nothing worked. I am no military; I don't know what to do in this kind of situations"

Malcolm sat at the other side of their bulky friend, and his feminine voice was harder than ever when he talked, the same with the gaze in his eyes.

"It doesn't matter where we are, what they have turned us into or what they're planning. I just care about two things: getting the hell out of here and taking revenge on those bastards. So you either get your scaly asses up and start planning a way out or I'll use you both as battering rams and made a way out by sheer force"

She was the one who broke the silence, trying to suppress her laugh.

"And how do you plan to lift us? Last time I checked, dinosaurs were way heavier than humanoid beings…"

A wide, crazy grin erupted in Mal's face, his hands shone blue and he pushed the first-aid box with his recently found telekinetic abilities before answering.

"Anger-fuelled telekinetic skills must do it"

She didn't reframe her laugh this time, and the gears on her mind started to work. Determination filled her eyes when looked at them again. And then, the magical words.

"I've got a plan"

* * *

They had created a whole language on their own in less of an hour: the weirdest mix ever of words in English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swish and Japanese, combined with manual sings that helped to signal the grammatical rules and concepts, and was the only thing that made it understandable. Whit it complete, their planning begun and the started to use fragments of lyrics, poems and novels when speed was needed in their speech or when there was too dark to allow them the use of the manual sings.

Their bodies were trained almost to exertion everyday while their rations became scarce as a response to their obviously suspicious actions. They didn't cared: in seven cycles of training, meals and watches Danielle and Keenan had adapted some of their martial arts knowledge to their new bodies, stressing her speed and his strength, while Malcolm proved his telekinetic skills as much as possible without guide. They also worked together, knowing that their ability to predict the other's movements could be a decisive point between success and failure.

They tried to forget that was a high chance that they needed to use force to scape, a high chance of becoming murderers.

The eighth day, they started the first part of the plan up.

They had to use what little they knew of their enemy to gather more information on them, even some allies if they could, to open their ways. It was all far riskier than what any of them liked but it was the idea with more success chance they had had – Malcolm had made the numbers.

All of them knew what they had to do and were ready to receive or cause injury in the way – as ready as any could ever be when they're fighting for their lives. Danielle's wound was better thanks to that medigel but she couldn't rest her side enough for it to close completely and there was a high risk of it opening in the middle of a skirmish; Keenan's ones had closed completely two cycles after he was thrown back into the cell, leaving nothing behind but impressive scars. He had even joked about how his friends back home would never let him live it up if they translated to his human body.

They were ready. Had pretended the whole day to be feverish and weak, and had finally settled to sleep on the wall right in front of the door, with a fake drowsy Malcolm on guard duty. It was easier to fake relaxation when your body was covered with scales that masked your body language and your face had alien features hard to read, they pretended to be relaxed but their bodies were ready to jump into action. The minutes came and went, and their eyes were still closed and their breaths even, but the nerves were getting harder to control.

Finally the door clicked slightly and a low groan from Dani's sub-vocals that they felt through resonating through her limbs gave the alert. The next they knew was that the door was opening and their bodies moving.

She jumped, saw Malcolm's blue force field pass to her right and heard Keenan charge to her left while she herself used her teropod legs, designed by nature for speed runs if she had to believe the designer words, to impulse her own charge against her assigned guard. Her body hit an armored one and without even stopping to look at it, she raised her closed fist and hit its head as hard as she could with it. She had never been faster in her live than the moment when she screamed the Spanish word for 'done' and ran through the threshold with Mal on her feet screaming his own word on English and a living tank no far behind, growling his word on Italian. He punched a panel next to the door and it closed, hiding the two soldiers and the scientist unconscious on the floor.

The hallway was in a demi dark state and either unmarked or marked with alien symbols that they had no hope to understand. Malcolm called them from a bifurcation ahead.

"Over here! I remember being taken this way!"

They followed the dark path and it took every little bit of will force for her to not stop in front of the scarce windows they found that actually seemed to look outside. Keenan was half blind with the scarce light while Dani put her improved night vision to good use by pin-pointing the cameras she saw to Malcolm, for him to throw an orb of blue energy and destroy them. The blue light of his body had become a constant and it made easier to find a follow the path he was making for them through the turns and empty rooms he entered, with his lighter and less sound footsteps.

He finally guided them a well-lit room that reminded her of a morgue form some movies – or maybe a mad scientist's lab – Malcolm shuddered and, after his eyes got used to the bright light, Keenan growled.

"They brought us here for their experiments. There must be some computer with an internet connection we could use here" said the designer with as much confidence as he could muster.

They started to look, ignoring everything with alien symbols. Soon enough their diplomat friend found something interesting: some weird, military weapon prototype that didn't had the form of a normal gun and that didn't seemed to shoot normal bullets. And it didn't have a silencer, so they decided not to test their theories right there. He decided that he was of better use guarding the door that messing around with his huge hands.

They tried by all means keep away from their minds the fact that if they were caught in some military base or under military jurisdiction of some kind of any country in the world, there was a huge possibility that no one would dare to go against it to rescue a designer and a musician. Keenan as a diplomat would have a better chance had he been more than just a young one making career in an organization that not all the countries respected. That obliterating the fact that if they were truly seeing new and secret technology, they would never get out of the base alive.

An emergency siren had just started to sound when Mal found something resembling a laptop and quickly opened it. It seemed to have no screen at all but soon an orange holographic one appeared and the blue one started to tip furiously on the bright keyboard. She decided to took one of the guns Keenan had found and went to his side to guard the door.

He watched her with one of his big, amber eyes, while she tried to find a comfortable position to hold the gun with her new fingers.

"Do you know how to shoot that thing?" he asked.

What they had come to consider a smile appeared in her face, and her vocals where thick with melancholy when she answered.

"Believe it or not my mother abandoned a promising career as a business woman to become a weapon designer. And two of my brothers saw their dreams came true when we moved back to USA and they joined the marines. I learnt to shoot before I learnt to play the guitar. And you, Mr. Diplomat?"

He gave her a smile back.

"It's a non-written rule that the assistants are the last defense between their bosses and every terrorist and assassin that wants them dead, so when we are being patronized by one of the big bosses we are taught to handle a gun even if when most of us don't have the stomach to endure the ordeal of shooting someone"

She bumped into him in a friendly way but the conversation died when their thoughts went to the things they had done since they woke up like this. A few minutes later Malcolm appeared behind them, holding a gun himself.

"The programming of that thing is the devil itself but I managed to send a message to some organizations listed as enemies of this on their files, with the coordinates of this computer as a way to locate us"

Dani nodded in approval before talking.

"We should find a place to hide our asses and wait for the help to come, and hide the guns. If they caught us again I highly doubt the strategy we used to work twice"

The designer nodded this time and took her gun from her hand and hid them under his tunic before doing the same with Keenan's.

"Are we ready to go?" asked the bigger one, uncomfortable with the loss of his weapon despite his thoughts.

The woman nodded and they started to walk the unknown hallway, with him and herself in front of the physically weaker of their group whom still destroyed every camera the scaly woman pointed. The bigger one stopped suddenly.

"Wait, how do we know that the people you sent the coordinates of this location won't nuke this place and rescue us instead?"

The designer didn't had time to answer before a soldier ran into him from a closed room on their right. Luckily he was fast enough to paralyze the man before Danielle or Keenan had had time to react violently and neutralize the perceived threat. She recognized his face: he was the soldier that had tried to warn her about the diplomat's new race possible behavior on waking up after being used as a lab rat. A soft growl advised precaution as he was their possible ally, as well as her raised hand for Malcolm to not put enough pressure to let him dizzy.

His voice was deep when he spoke, but calm and more surprised than scared.

"So it's true then, you've got the minds of humans"

Keenan growled his anger.

"We _are_ humans, you son of a…" Her soft thrill stopped his words and he turned his amber gaze to her "He is the one? Are you sure?" She nodded before speaking to their capture.

"You warned me about something, what was it and why did you do it?"

He looked at her alien eyes with his human ones.

"I warned you about the krogan before his species are brutal and violent, and they hate turians almost as much as they hate salarians, he might have killed you… but he didn't. Your friends insisted in them being humans despite the evidence, but you act too much like us to be lying. And if you're truly humans, then what we are doing is wrong"

"What else would we be? We aren't animals! You've got no right to do what you did!" Malcolm's anger flared and it weakened his grip on the soldier, who held his hands up slowly in a pacifying sing.

"I know it now. I'm truly sorry for what they did to you but now we've gotta get the hell out of here. The emergency protocols will kick in as soon as the high ranks see that is neither the simulation nor a false alarm. You got lucky, now if you want to get out you've gotta let me go and follow me"

The group shared a gaze and thoughts, and after Danielle's nod Malcolm let the force field vanish and when the soldier started trotting down the hallway, they followed him. He looked at his side to found the designer running next to him.

"I'm Jacob by the way"

He nodded and gave their names.

"Malcolm, the giant ninja turtle is a Keenan, an important active from the UN and the spikey dinosaur is the great Demon from _Oblivion_ , sometimes also known as Danielle. You've kidnapped the wrong people man, we are all known by the public eye"

The black man just denied with his head as he kept his gaze on the road ahead, eyeing carefully every corner with his gun on hand.

"I don't pretend to know how this scientific shit works, I'm nothing that a soldier. But I can tell you for sure that there were any neither human nor alien abduction since I'm in this facility. Finding you here was a surprise"

"Where is this facility located?" Keenan asked, with his deep growling voice as low as he could.

"Omega station, as far from Council law as we could get. Somewhere in the Terminus system"

"I won't pretend that I understood a shit of what you just said, but on the light of the evidence I'll ask just one question. Are we, by any means, on the space? Like out of the Earth not like in the special dimensions…" The weird gaze from the diplomat made Malcolm stop his rant "What? I'm a graphic designer, everything I do have to have coherence within the special dimensions…"

"Could you just answer Jacob?" Danielle interrupted, as amused as she was by the blue one attitude.

He was looking at them as if they had two heads.

"We are not even near the Sol system or Alliance space! Everyone knows about the Terminus systems and the conflict with the batarians…!"

Malcolm spoke again.

"Is this Alliance you mentioned some kind of Starfleet?"

"Oh no…" Keenan said while they ran around a corner, he already knew where this was going.

"It has many fleets guarding Alliance space, but I don't think I've ever heard…"

The blue one didn't let him finish.

"That's great! So now I confirm that we are in the world of Start Trek – a geek's dream came true! Now, we've gotta find the Enterprise and ask them for a ride back to Earth!"

Keenan wasn't the only one who wanted to stop and smack his head, but the desperate gaze in his green eyes stopped both of them. Danielle's soft whisper was the only thing that was heard after his growl.

"We are going back to Earth, whether is onboard of the Enterprise of an Imperial Dreadnought is yet to be seen. Where are you guiding us to, Jacob?"

The black man still seemed to think of them all as crazy people, but answered with steady voice.

"We're going to the hangars, it should be easy enough to take a shuttle and get to the spaceport where you could find a ship offworld"

Malcolm kept asking questions to avoid thinking, while the other concentrated in the task at hand to do the same. He came up with a coherent question a few turns later.

"Jacob, how do you know that we are humans? Our bodies aren't for certain"

It was easy to say by his voice ring that the human was growing tired of talking, and that also was worried about being discovered, but seemed troubled enough about torturing humans for him to keep answering all of their questions.

"The fact that you only spoke human tongues helps, but it's mostly the way you move and the topics you speak about. Aliens maybe despite the asari aren't so cultivated in human culture"

"What's an asari?"

"You are an asari"

"And what are they then?"

The exasperation was patent when the man signaled behind him.

"What you've called a ninja turtle it's a krogan – in my opinion the most dangerous species in the galaxy – and the woman is a turian, we fought them in the First Contact War"

"And why I'm a female asari while they kept their genders in this form?"

"That's because…"

His words and steps were stopped by the signal of a closed fist in front of him, and his military training kicked in even when the hand giving it had only three fingers and didn't belong to his commander officer. When Dani, whom had given the signal saw that Malcolm had the intention of asking something again she pointed to where her ear should have been had she been a human and the around.

She could hear the heavy footsteps and human voices coming to them, but she didn't know how much had improved her hearing to signal distances for sure. She the pointed to a room to their left with a red hologram of the door and Jacob quickly entered a code on the interface that turned the red to green before opening the door and silently signaling them to enter the room before closing it behind his back and blocking it again.

"What do we do now?" asked the diplomat.

The now known as a turian raised her head.

"We knew that the chances of a successful scape on this try were almost zero. We did it better than expected, now we've got an ally, someone knows that we are here and a rescue may be incoming. Even with our destruction of the cameras it was obvious were we were going, that's why we need someone working for the inside. Are you willing to help us another time, Jacob?"

He seemed in doubt for a second, but a gaze at the now stained bandages that covered the middle of the woman and the haunted gaze of the asari seemed enough for him to take a decision.

"I will help. If there aren't any changes my next turn to go with those that give you food will be in five days, but I'm sure that they'll take you for experimentation tonight. Survive until then and I'll call a few favors and get us out of here"

She nodded and signaled to Malcolm.

"We grabbed some guns, if you could bring some chargers with you when you come. Also it would be fantastic if you could get us some clothes, I don't think we could mingle with whatever crowd is out there if we're mostly naked. Now, any ideas on how we're going to get out of this room without you getting suspected?"

Keenan walked to Jacob and hit him in the stomach suddenly, that before giving him a head-butt that let him dizzy and on the brink of unconsciousness.

"What the hell are you doing?!" murmured Danielle, before going to the human and helping him to stay on his feet.

The krogan just shrugged.

"Add a few claw marks there and they won't suspect from him. Let him lying on the hallways and steal any kind of GPS-thingy he could have as well as his gun and nobody could think him a traitor. Are you okay with the plan, Jacob?"

The human gave the big one a nasty glare before nodding and put more of his weight on his legs.

"We should hurry then. They could be on the corner"

Dani thought she heard Malcolm murmur something that sounded like ' _diplomat my mother'_ before heading to the door and let Jacob look out before signaling them to follow. He then gave the designer something he pulled from his wrist and that soon enough shone with an orange holographic interface that showed a map of the facility. He took his own gun and gave it to the singer before turning back the way they came.

"Good luck people. See you around"

He ran down the hallway, to the place they had found him and pretended to be dumped in the floor. A gash in his head from the krogan head-butt was bleeding and his chest still burned with each breath but he knew it had been necessary.

Back with the group Mal was reading the map with Keenan scouting ahead while Danielle closed the march, her face a mask to hide the fear that was eating her insides, keeping her throat tense to force her vocals to shut up without knowing that her scent gave her away. If she had paid attention she could have smelled the krogan's and the asari's feelings too, not far from her own.

The scaled ones, with their enhanced hearing, heard the enemy steps closing on them until they fell on their small group. A look and a manual sing was enough to point the strategy they were going to use, and soon enough Malcolm was screaming and crying while Keenan and she charged. They barely have taken down three enemies when their resistance became futile: the gun ran out of ammo and her claws couldn't pass through the metallic material of the armor.

The krogan threw the gun before throwing himself at the soldiers. She went to the fallen, looking for their guns before hearing a change in the asari's scream: from feigned shock to true fear. She turned grasping her new gun and found two of the soldiers with her friend, retaining his blue glowing arms with all the strength they could muster until one of them raised his hand and hit her friend's head with the butt of his gun.

"Let him go!" the scream let her throat before she had time to think about what she was doing.

The next second she had Keenan roaring at her side, with ager-filled amber eyes and a gun pointed to those ahead of them.

"I would do it if I were you" he said with his voice strained for fighting down the more animalistic sounds that wanted to get out.

But he hadn't defeated all the operatives that now where behind them and both of their ears where fine enough to hear them approaching. He was about to charge back to his enemies and she was going to try her best to free their friend when one of the men who were retaining the designer stepped forward and yelled at them, while he pressed the barrel of his gun against Mal's head.

"We've had enough of you stupid aliens! You surrender your guns or this petty excuse of a female dies here and now!"

Two deep growls came from their throats, but with the sound of guns being pointed at them from behind now they knew that even if they succeeded in putting the men in front of them down, the bullets intended for them could hit Malcolm and he had not the same scaly armor they had. They shared another gaze before lowering their weapons.

In seconds they were kneeling with their hands held at their backs, both of them making their best to retain the instinctive wish to lash at their captors and put them down. They had no right to do this, absolutely no right to capture and play with them. The one that had threatened with shooting the asari shoved him to the other man and the started to give orders while looking in his belt for something.

"Put them on separate cells and find out how they managed to escape. Make sure there is always someone guarding their doors. I want to know everything they do"

He found what he had been looking for and quickly injected the blue one with something that made him dizzy and sleepy before heading to them. Suddenly someone spoke through a communicator in his ear started to speak.

"Bring the turian here Sargent, our boss wishes to know how well the transference went with her"

"Aye-aye sir" He moved to the woman then and handed her over to a pair of soldiers, that took her struggling form with a bit of unease she tried to exploit to escape unsuccessfully "Take her to the lab, Doc will tell you then where you're needed. The rest of you, submit the krogan and take him to the B-sector, he's the most dangerous one"

They hadn't considered the chance of being separated after their little run in the hallways. How in hell where they supposed to plan and take down their enemies now? The last card was Jacob, and Keenan was grateful that they had found in him an ally. He saw Danielle being taken and knew that things had just gotten harder.

The last she thought about while she saw her bigger friend look at her, was that this was just beginning, and while her eyes moved to her blue friend she swore to herself that they would get the designer out of this hellhole at any cost.


	4. Chapter 4 - Shepard 1

Sorry for the delay! I started second year of industrial engineering and it's getting really hard and demanding. Besides I decided to change some things in the timeline and such and that took some time, and then halfway through the chapter I found out that I had to change one of the characters to get the story working the way I want to work, and then my computer died and I had to write the rest between my tablet and any computer I could get my hands on.

It is painful the way the chapter shows it was written slowly but if I edit it now I will never get to write the fifth chapter. Luckily winter break in just a few weeks away, so now I only have to survive the finals to get to the next chapter - now half written in a notebook. Damn! M!Shep is really hard to write.

Bioware owns all but the OCs and the plot.

I hope you enjoy the reading!

* * *

 **The Travelers**

 **Chapter Four: Rescue mission  
**

 **Shepard 1**

* * *

John Shepard, Alliance military Staff Lieutenant, walked down from his temporary spot in the bridge all the way down to the debriefing room. He still didn't trusted enough in Sulik, the turian helmsman of the ship, so he spent most of his time co-piloting the ship and aiding with the human features of the flight system.

Now Nihlus Kryik, CO of the ship and the one in charge of this operation in the turian design vessel with the first multi-species crew in history had called him. He was third in the chain of command and officially in charge of the marines of the crew, so he was the one who usually got to decide the ground teams and their actions. He arrived to the meeting and stood at attention with a perfect human salute to his superior.

"You called, sir?"

"At ease Lieutenant" spoke the turian with his flanged voice "Last night cycle our sensors caught a distress call coming from the Terminus Systems, it was nothing short of a message in human common asking for help and the coordinates of the computer used to send it. The encryption was Alliance military standard issue, so it falls within our jurisdiction having an Alliance officer on board"

"Was there any clue on whom was the one sending the message? Last I knew there were no Alliance operations on the Terminus"

The turian denied with his head before holding a datapad in his direction.

"I have already asked for disclosure of any Alliance file with the word 'Terminus' on it, but it had revealed nothing so far. There is the chance that maybe someone captured by the batarians in the last raid had been able to escape long enough to send the message. Our ETA to the facility is of three hours, read what little we have of them and assemble a ground team, you are going down with them. Assess the situation and act accordingly, I'm leaving this mission on your hands"

The human straightened and saluted.

"Aye-aye, sir"

"Dismissed"

Shepard sent a ping to the ones he wanted in his team and started to read the intel for his mission the moment he stepped into the elevator. The first thing on his list was preparing himself to debrief his people in the mission to come, the second was to get his weapons ready and work as much possible scenarios about the mission outcome in his head as possible.

The message they had received was on top and something among its lines tickled something in the back of his mind, it was standard English but something in the order of the words, on the only slang expression seemed just _off_. Maybe someone whose mother speech wasn't what aliens called 'human common', aliens weren't fond of learning new languages – not that they needed to thanks to the sub dermal translator implants – and most of them only dominate their own mother speech and a few more dialects of their species. He himself spoke only English that his military training had thankfully improved from the slums where he had grown up back on Earth.

Half an hour before the timeline, he got to the cargo hold where the Gunnery Chief, an asari commando by the name of Leira Rivanis, was getting the weapons for the ground team. He noded to her, acknowledging her salute, while he let his datapad down and walked to his locker to get his medium N7 armor. He was putting together his last gauntlet when the rest of his team came down of the elevator.

The first to get out was an average height, ivory-plated turian male in light mantis armor, standard engineer gear while on uncertain terrain. He had been one of the first turians he had found himself able to pinpoint from the others, if only for the fact that his red markings shone bright on his plates and his demeanor, even when confident, was more relaxed that your everyday turian – hadn't he belonged to that species, he would have ventured the guy was shy. Drusus, saluted him before waling straight to his assault rifle and start checking it for the last time.

The second one was Leira's sister, Alisha. The asari was like a ninja from the old tales, a commando her species had reluctantly let go to join the Council project. With her light guardian armor she was meant to melt in the shadows and fry her enemy with biotics. He had soon learnt that she work better when her sister wasn't on the ground team with her, and so he never again had taken the siblings together. She, as the turian before her, saluted him and went to check her own guns.

The third and last was the krogan mercenary that Nihlus had forced C-Sec to let go to serve and pay his debt with society serving under a Spectre. The eight feet man towered just above everyone on the ship and was a fearful sight, always clad in his medium red mercenary armor. He had accepted his punishment and was happy to pass it smashing some heads instead of sulking in some cell back on the Citadel, and was friendly enough with every neither no-turian nor salarian crewmen. Wrex didn't salute him, but gave him a sound 'Shepard' as acknowledgment before following the others.

Once they all were ready in the cargo hold, with their guns in their backs and the helmets on their hands he spoke.

"Our mission is to infiltrate an unknown-flag facility on Omega. The message was in human common and encrypted with standard Alliance code, but it could be a set-up. Drusus, as soon as we are inside I want you to hack into their systems and get us the blueprints of the place and any other think that may be useful. Rivanis, you will scout ahead as soon as we have the map and assess as much as you can about or enemy. Wrex and I will wait for Drusus to get the data and then we'll proceed. Any question?"

The krogan smiled.

"Ain't this whole op a bit rash, Shepard? Usually you spend a whole hour talking strategies and sharing what little intel we've got on the matter"

"We don't have much this time Wrex, our dear CO is looking for something else but until then we'll have to do with what we have"

The mercenary grin just turned bigger.

"Not your usual MO but its fine with me. Just like the old times."

"Not us are used to engage in half-assessed missions" interrupted cynically the young turian.

Wrex reacted fine, the young one was probably the only turian he tolerated besides Nihlus himself.

"Mercenary work never comes with much intel, boy. And think about it, at least our enemies aren't expecting us"

"You... actually make a good point"

The asari gave a smile of her own before talking.

"Want me to use some radio channel or you prefer radio-silence and onmi-tool messages?"

"Use channel seven, but if I order radio-silence pass everything through Nero. Questions?"

They all denied with their heads while the adrenaline – or alien equivalents of it – started to pump through their veins in anticipation. Thanks to the Council clearance and Nihlus' Spectre authority the 'half-assessed' missions, as Nero had called it, were few and far in-between and usually involved getting deep into the Terminus and lots of batarians. This was something new that all of them, soldiers and adrenaline-junkies as they were, would be enjoying.

Soon enough the pilot's voice came from the comm, telling them to get ready for the drop. They got to the shuttle in time, and then it all started.

.

The place they had to infiltrate was located in one of the oldest mines of the asteroid, a shady place even for Omega, somewhere not even Aria's law could reach. Getting there had been quite easy after leaving the shuttle and the pilot in the docks, with the excuse of resupply and taken one of the dark passages mostly controlled by vorcha to the place.

It had been a surprise to find that all the guards around it were humans.

Getting in had been easy enough, the humans obviously didn't had the manpower enough to keep static guards around the perimeter so they took one of the windows between the guards for Alisha to use her biotics to lift them all up to the next level and enter using one of the windows there.

Once inside they split and did as planned: Nero found a terminal and hacked into it, shutting off any camera circuits in the facility, reverting the recordings and loping them to make it seem like anything had changed. Meanwhile Alisha scouted ahead with the blueprints the turian had provided and Wrex and himself guarded the hacker. It took him a few seconds to download a great amount of archives and start running decrypting programs in his omnitool before turning the interface off and nodding to his team mates while taking his assault rifle from his back.

They started to walk into the depths of the facility, guided by their maps and Rivanis' occasional word of advise about some turn or hallway. Two minutes later, Drusus opened his omnitool and called his commander officer.

"Lieutenant, you need to take a look at this"

Shepard arched an eyebrow to the krogan, who understood and stood guard in front of them while he gave his undivided attention to the muted footage being projected in the small holographic screen. It didn't seem to be a security footage, more like something being captured to have a visual register of something. There were a group of scientists-looking humans torturing - there wasn't any other word to describe what they were doing - a young asari tied to an operation table. Her violet blood dripped from the sides and pooled surround her, and the poor woman seemed to scream in agony and anger words the humans either didn't understood or plainly didn't care about.

"It was attached to a files folder named as 'Subject Six' and there are seven more folders like it with both, Council races and not Council races, even krogan! Anything but humans"

"This humans are mad if you ask me" the always useful comment from Wrex.

"Do we know who send the distress signal?"

"According to the files, subjects six, seven and eight escaped a few days ago and broke havoc on the facility. One of them sent the message with the signal using an old method of information going in bursts through the comms relays with the coordinates of the terminal used, instead of going for the traditional beacon system. That made us able to find them even when they cut the signal"

"Find the location of the experiment subjects, we are rescuing them and finding out who in hell is behind this and why. Forward the location of the nearest to Rivanis, she will tell us if there is any danger ahead, then keep downloading all you can from their servers: we are leaving a little surprise when we leave"

"Aye-aye sir" acknowledged Drusus with a turian smile.

"As you wish, Lieutenant" he heard the asari acknowledge her orders through the comm.

He turned and fixed his gaze on the krogan.

"By any means don't charge if I don't order you to"

The mercenary groaned but nodded once and Shepard knew he would obey him. Wining an old krogan's respect was not a small feat, but once it was in place it was pretty difficult to shake it off.

They walked quietly through the hallways with the occasional report from the commando telling them what to expect in the next turn. They disposed silently of a few guards before getting just a turn away from the first containment cell holding 'Subject Six', the asari from the vid. Alisha was already waiting for them uncloaked and with the intel ready.

"There were only two guards just a minute ago but one more appeared in that time. All of them have guns and biotic dampeners. I've checked, but there is only one way into the cell and the prisoner within it, and is through that door"

The Lieutenant nodded while scrolling through the information on his head, getting ready to give the order to take them down when he heard a shot just down the hallway to the cell. He and his team rushed around the corner in time to see a black soldier with one man with the same armor as his at his feet, shoot another man straight in the head. The soldier in him acted even before he has finished assessing the situation.

"Freeze! Drop the gun and turn back slowly!"

The man made the gesture of dropping the gun just before turning around and shooting in their general direction, forcing them into cover before speaking.

"I have no issues with you, Alliance! I'm here just to take a few friends out! I won't get in your way"

Rivanis had disappeared when they took cover, and they found out where she was when Shepard was starting to answer. She uncloaked just behind the soldier and hit him in the back of his neck and then in the back of his left knee, forcing him to the ground before kicking the gun out of his grasp. It wasn't long before she had him pinned down by her strong biotics. The rest of the team walked down to them.

"Nice work Rivanis" he said before looking to the turian at his left ". Find the door codes in these men suits or crack it open"

"Understood, Lieutenant"

He then turned to the human being retained by the asari, with a look of surprise in his face.

"So you're here to rescue them?"

"If by them you mean the people you are experimenting upon, then yes, we are here to rescue them. Who are you? Who are the ones doing this and why you go against them?"

The man looked at him with honest eyes.

"My name is Jacob Taylor, and I believe in what my people stands for, it's just this cell that got carried away. I didn't sign up for this so I mean to stop it, but now you are here. They need your help"

"Lieutenant, I've opened the door" Nero called out.

Shepard looked at the man at his feet.

"What do you know abot this people? Are they agressive?"

"As much as anyone on their situation should be. They are fighting new instincts, not sure how they will react to meeting aliens though, they are going to be in a big shock once their minds had had time to process everything. Now it's not the time to fuss over it" said when he saw the intent in the Alliance's man face ", the guard change its in one hour, you should be on your way by then"

The turian opened the door in that moment and was assaulted by a furious asari with bright biotics, screaming with rage.

"You sons of bitches! I won't go down without a fight! I won't let you hurt us anymore! I..."

"Malcolm! Stop! They're here to help!" The asari – Malcolm? – stopped throwing biotic-augmented punches that the turian diverted the moment she heard Jacob's voice.

She seemed to deflate when she took in the scene of fully armed soldiers and the dead men in the floor. She stood and spited on them.

"I told you I was going to get out you motherfuckers! Who's the weakling now, eh?" She then seemed to see the other species operatives, and laughed, a maniacal sound that had nothing of joy in it "And look Jacob! There are other ones like Dani, Keeny and I. What have they done to you guys?"

Rivanis walked ahead with wide eyes, and spoke.

"Where in asari space where you born?" The other asari glowered at her.

"Why are you talking some kind of space-elf-language? All soft and round, speak English goddamit! Not everyone in here is a Tolkien geek"

Shepard felt his blood run cold. He didn't need to ask to himself if he had understood right, because Wrex took the chance out of him.

"Obviously this asari is madder that a pyjack going against a maw"

Malcolm jumped at the sound of the krogan's voice.

"Wow, did he just growled some kind of words? Keenan doesn't speak like that. Where am I the geek convention full of elvish and klingorn speakers?"

Rivanis and the Urdnot shared a gaze and Shepard walked ahead, making his omnitool appear and turning off his translator implant.

"Can you understand what I am saying?" The blue one smiled.

"Finally someone normal!" The words rolling out of the blue lips were pure, unaltered old American English straight out of a vid. She smiled "Why aren't they talking as normal people? I'm pretty sure that there is no language on Earth with that sounds"

Shepard turned his translator back on and stated.

"So, you were born on Earth"

"Where else?" Asked the asari with sarcasm "It's not like humanity has been to Mars yet"

Alisha froze, her mind working faster than the other ones'. She turned to him.

"Ask her when she was born, how old is she. She speaks like a human, maybe an asari maiden but her skin tone and crest are those of a matron. If she was born on Earth, then she shouldn't be older than thirty, therefore being a child for our people"

The Lieutenant did as she said, none of them were ready for the answer.

"I'm twenty-nine, almost thirty, and I was born in 1989 you lazy people who don't want to make counts" They all held their breaths and then she surprised then with another piece of knowledge "I'm also a man, so the sooner you could get us back to our dimension, universe, timeline or whatever, the better"

"Asari aren't either, male or female" pointed Rivanis.

" _That's_ what you are going to remark? S... He just told us that he was born more than two human centuries ago _as a human_ and you are worried because he doesn't want to be in a monogendered species body?" Said the turian with disbelief.

"There will be time later to explore what the hell is happening, right now we need to rescue the other people" Interposed Shepard, trying to get his own mind away from the umbelievable sort of event developing just in front of him.

The man in the asari body in front of him changed his expression from smugness and playfulness to dead serious and resolute, with a bit of fear in the dephs of his blue eyes. Jacob saw this and spoke with soothing voice.

"I know the best paths to get to them and then get out. They are being held in the high-security area as they both are considered dangerous: Keenan tried to pass through the cell walls when we took him in alone, and Danielle pretended to be weak just to claw one of the scientists in the neck when they got her to the labs"

The smile returned to his blue face, but it was bitter and dark.

"Oh, I'd kill those bastards myself if given the chance" and then suddenly clawed with his hands at the bracelet handcuffs around his wrists "Can you take this off? It feels like they can electrocute me at any time with them on"

Shepard nodded to Drusus and he synched his omnitool to the cuffs systems before hacking them open. Meanwhile the human himself turned on a translation program on his 'tool used for emergencies.

"Let's keep up with the plan. Jacob, are you willing to obey my orders?"

"As long as it takes to get this people out…"

"Lieutenant Shepard. Have you any spare weapons for our friend?"

The man nodded and tried to give the asari a gun, but he just denied.

"Save it for the others, they were the ones who knew how to use a gun. I've got this" said before letting the blue light of biotics powers lit up his fists.

"Ok people, lets move. Rivanis take point as before; Taylor, give her advice on the best ways to go via messages but stand behind us. Wrex and I will take point, Malcolm I want you behind with Drusus and Jacob you get me?"

They all acknowledged his orders in their different ways, from the military pose of their resident enemy soldier to the quiet nod of their recently rescued and very confusing asari.

The next one in their way and less dangerous was the turian, marked on the files Drusus had retrieved as 'Subject Eight', and named as Danielle by the two men who seemed to know her. Again, Rivanis cleared their way there, which seemed to be more heavily guarded as they got closed to the laboratories.

Finally they stood on the corner of their next objective. Jacob walked confidently to them while Alisha sneaked behind and Shepard looked at them through his scope. Soon enough the two soldiers guarding the cell door where not a problem. The turian walked in and started hacking the lock while the rest of the team waited.

Soon enough the door was opened and a distinctively turian flanging voice was heard, feminine, full of anger and in the same human tongue he himself speaks since always.

"Come again for more punishing? I don't care what you're doing next; we'll escape and nuke this place! I swear it you hear me! You're not getting away from this unharmed!"

Nero seemed to cringe and Wrex glared, maybe at something she was saying with the second set of vocal chords that was out of human hearing. He signaled Malcolm and Jacob to move forward ahead of him and saw the woman gasp at the sight of the ones she knew. The asari spoke in a soothing voice while the soldier walked ahead to release her from the cuffs pinning her hands to the wall.

"It's over now Dani. This people is here to help us, we're going home"

Her eyes met his and he could sense her assessing the situation while the last bindings fell to the ground. He had been serving with turians for a while now and he was used to see their ungloved hands and the dangerous talons on the nude, but he wasn't used to see them painted with dry human blood. Her gaze was dangerous in a way a trapped animal one is, and the fact that she was completely naked didn't much to hide the tension and violence about to snap, nor the fact that not even with the bandaged injuries of recent fights she had stopped fighting for her freedom.

She didn't seemed to bother about her nude state while walking to the black man and extending her hand in a silent request while said man grabbed a heavy gun from a holster in his back and passed it to her, signaling a few things in silence. Despite her cold demeanor, her voice was softer when she spoke again.

"I hope so, I didn't know if I could handle one more day in this place without going mad or having a psychotic breakdown. My head is killing me and It's not like if one can relax while being experimented upon"

Her facial plates made it hard for him to see at first, as used as he was to turian expressions by now after months serving with them, but her grimace was a very human one, bending the mandibles in ways he had never seen a turian bend them. Her grip on her gun was weird too and he could see his resident turian frowning at that.

Drusus actually stepped forward and took her hand to try and correct her grip, and was received with a sound so vicious and wild none of them had heard ever come from a turian throat followed by a punch to his armored torso he got to deviate out of sheer instinct rather than conscious action. She seemed to realize then what she was doing and clamped her flaring mandibles to her mouth before trying to give a reassuring half-smile to her asari friend and extending the hand with the gun on it to the engineer in a peace offer.

He couldn't read the nuances of the speech he was loosing, but Wrex commentary more than made up for it.

"Well, never thought I'll see a turian go all feral in my lifetime. Tight-up-asses who want to make us believe that they are better than us"

Both of that species ignored him while the male adjusted the grip on the gun and the female just nodded in thanks before looking at Jacob.

"Well, we're getting Kenny or not?"

He stepped forward this time.

"He is the last one we need to rescue before heading off. All of you keep the same formation as before, Danielle I see you can handle a gun, can you obey orders?"

"As long as you don't ask me to shot my friends or myself"

"Well then, cover the rear with Drusus, Jacob and Malcolm. Don't interfere and don't shot if there is not a firefight going on. Malcolm I want you to keep a barrier up for the both of you the second we get near enemies, if things go bad you two are to evade combat since you don't have any shields"

He saw the woman share a gaze with the asari, who touched her arms briefly before falling in line behind them soon followed by the turian.

They walked down the hallways to the depths of the facility. They found more and more guards and he could tell that despite their wish to rescue their friend, Danielle and Malcolm were getting more and more nervous as time passed. He didn't had time to think of something to take care of the problem nervous armed people meant when Alisha, scouting ahead down the next stairs section, used the comm.

"Lieutenant I have readings of a giant squad of enemies between us and the next cell. There is no way to avoid it and my sensors read twenty enemies at least"

"There isn't any way around this Jacob?" He asked, fearing the fight to come.

The man started to deny with his head, and then his omnitool pinged. He wasted no time in opening the message that had popped up in the holo screen.

"Shit, they are going to try to enrage Keenan so he fights"

A deep growl left the turian throat that lowered her instance as if she was ready to pounce, and the asari just let his factions turn into stone while his tight fists glowed blue.

"Well, do I get to show these guys what fighting a krogan truly means?"

Said Wrex and soon enough he called Alisha back and they all stood behind the corner where they could hear the chatter and bowering near them but make an action plan soon enough. Jacob popped up a map of this section with the modifications his faction had added to the basic facility map Drusus had hacked and he looked carefully the details.

"Ok, they outnumber our combat force five to one as Jacob can't be seen fighting his own and I highly doubt the both of you" he said turning to their rescues "could stand your own in anything more than a skirmish, no offense intended. So we need a diversion, we need them to keep their attention in something else. Jacob, pass that map to all of us and mark on it the easiest exit road out of the building, as well as two alternative paths if that one was to fail"

"With all due respect Lieutenant but, shouldn't I be guiding you out?"

"Want to keep you job or not?"

The man shut up and did as asked when Malcolm, whom had been looking carefully at the map in front of him suddenly called out.

"Wait, there is a way we both can be of use" they all regarded him with a confused look, and he pointed out a ventilation duct that lead into the cell wall ". We can appear in the cell and divert their attention from an opened door"

The female turian did her best impression of a frown.

"I don't think this body allows for crawling through pipes and tubes with the maneuverability I would need to get out and fight"

The asari just smirked and joked.

"Don't worry dear; I will take care of you"

Danielle just gave a sub-vocal half-laugh while he quickly went over the plan.

"This could work, Jacob could be the reason for having the door open in the first place and if we take them for surprise we could be off this damned station by the time they wake up and decide to ring the alarm" he sent a ping to Nihlus in the _Conviction_ just to be sure that they were ready to depart at any time and seconds after received the affirmative answer of the Spectre ". Okay, any objections?"

The enemy soldier was the only one to speak, and not to him but to the ones he had helped to rescue.

"This is suicide; none of you has shields or military training. These men are mercenaries trained to kill, if you go in there in this state you are not getting out"

Malcolm was the one who answered.

"We need to do this Jacob, we need to get Kenny out of this hell"

"You need to do this? Why? Can't you…?"

"Shut the hell up! Both of you!" Called out Alisha to everyone's surprise "The longer we stay here discussing the more time they have to lure your friend into his species characteristic blood rage, so either we let you and make another plan or you go along with what we have"

Nobody dared to speak and Shepard marked in his mental agenda to talk to Nihlus about the Commando's leadership skills. He clasped his own hands, taking the attention of them all out of the asari.

"Okay so we go along with the plan. Danielle, as I guess you will be the one calling the shots while Malcolm keeps a barrier to protect you, would you know how to handle yourself with a SMG?"

She moved her head in denial.

"I would need more time to adjust to the recoil and use both hands to hold it still, a gun is more practical"

"I understand. Nero, give them please something to help them communicate with us so we can tell them when to draw the attention. Jacob, I want you to go in there on my signal, if you don't want to cooperate with our team then better say so now because if you ruin this, I am giving Wrex permission to bite your head off"

"Aye-aye, sir" said after a few seconds of hesitation, and to him his acceptance seemed true enough.

Drusus passed on a spare omni-tool to Malcolm to handle the communications, the soldiers walking them to an entrance to the ventilation tubes they would be using while Jacob sent a message back to his co-workers for them to wait just a little longer for him. With the aid of Wrex, Danielle got into the ducts and Malcolm soon followed behind.

Alisha disappeared of his sight in a second and he guided the rest of his team behind Jacob to the corner where they were supposed to wait. Down the hall just one guard was in front of the ajar door, throwing glances here and there through the aperture to what lay inside. As soon as Malcolm sent them the message that they were in position he sent their ally towards the door with barely a nod. He held his fist at the ready for Nero to give the others the signal to attack.

Sooner than expected Jacob was talking to the other soldier and opening the door, all that while his fist went down and the momentum accumulated in his legs sent him forward. He heard Nero call the order of attack and the clear sound of shots in the cell where the krogan was.a enemies were down. His gaze was instantly set upon his team, checking that they were all alright before being distracted by the elephant in the room: the amber eyed krogan in battle stance in front of the opening of the ventilation conduit where his friends were in.

The sight of Jacob relaxed a little bit his stance, but he still growled when Shepard walked ahead. He put his gun back in his magnetic holster before putting his hands ahead, palms up in a universal human sing for peace. Wrex behind him growled, because that gesture just proved weakness for him, but if this one as his friends carried himself as a human then he would apreciate the familiar gesture. And it was the correct action to take because it didn't take long for he to relax and even give them his back to help his friends.

John was about to call the retreat when he noticed the injuries in the krogan's hide, and it seemed that as soon as they were free his friends did too, because he soon saw the giant dodge their preoccupied hands and speak with a voice deeper but softer than Wrex's.

"I'm fine, they're already healing anyway" at the pointed gaze of the asari he sighed "If I allow a medic to watch them over later would you be pleased?"

"All of you are going to receive medical help once on board the _Conviction_. Now it's time to get out of here and back on the ship. My name is Shepard and you are to follow my orders until we reach safety"

The three rescued aliens nodded and without hesitation he turned and shot Jacob on the leg. He fell to the ground.

"What was that for?!"

"This way you can get away with what you did. Tell your bosses that you got shot and pretended to be dead. If you need to pinpoint some group tell them that we wore Alliance standard gear, this way there is not chance of retribution in other species. Thanks for your cooperation"

He walked by the man who was muttering something behind his breath and watched the rescued krogan kneel before the human.

"You aided us greatly, my friend. If there is ever a way to repay you for what you did for us and we are still roaming this place, look for Keenan Sokolov and I will do what I can for you" the tone, clear, calm and pacifier was one he had never heard from one of that species.

The turian pulled her first to her heart and straightened and the asari just waved his hand before walking away.

The way back to where they had gone inside was easier than the way in and soon enough they were taking the shuttle back to the ship. He called back asking for medical assistance in the shuttle bay ready for a krogan and a turian, and also some clothes for them.

When they finally got to the ship and stood there in front of the crew he could cut the tension with a knife. Nihlus himself stood there, his severe expression intimidating even to him.

"What does this mean, Shepard?"


	5. Chapter 5 - Keenan 2

Good lord! Finals, partials, firefox and the aproaching summer conspiring to kill my laptop... And look! Next week... more finals! And when I thought I had a nice warp up for this chapter, I saw the title of it again and remembered I was only halfway.

I don't really know when chapter 6 will be - and I've stoped making assumptions. I won't abandon this story, but... lets just say that we will all have a nice time finishing Mass Effect Andromeda before this is even beginning to warp up. And re-reading, I really have to find time, sit one day and correct all the typos.

Thanks for all those who favourite and follow, and all you people for just stopping by.

And... the last thing I have to tell it's that I have an AO3 account now, and that I'll start to publish my works - specially the series - there. You can find me under the same name as here, NatShinigami - I know, I'm boring, I also recicle OC character names from ff for my original stories.

As always, everything but the OCs and emotional torture the characters go by, belongs to Bioware.

Without futher ado - and self promotion - here lies the fifth instalment in this endeavor.

* * *

 **The Travelers**

 **Chapter Five – No Way Back**

 **Keenan 2**

* * *

There was a commotion when they finally got on board the ship named _Conviction_. He didn't care too much, since getting out of the base they had been everything else had faded into a haze of incredulity and fear.

He just wanted to go home and be over with all this.

But then a few people like Danielle and the other one in their group stepped forward and covered their bodies in the most comfortable military-grade blankets he had ever had the dubious pleasure to feel against his skin. He would have felt threatened, his weird inhuman instincts wanting to snap and just get away from all this, but he held them in a tight grasp, knowing that out of them he was the one with more political and diplomatical leverage to get them where they wanted back home.

Malcolm had the most relaxed expression he had ever seen in his blue face and he could tell that he was in fact starting to drowse in his place, his scent waving between wonder and tiredness. Danielle had started babbling incoherently to them about the song she was going to write about this adventure and how she wanted to meet them again when things were back to normal, her second vocals purring with relief and her own scent heavy with untold joy making him dizzy. He himself couldn't help to start feeling that way too.

It was over, they were free. It shouldn't be too long now until they were back to their human bodies and their very human lives, they had the tech to bring them to this situation so they must have a way to reverse this big mistake.

He felt his heart leap in joy with the bare thought of going back home, hanging out with his friends, working in making the world a better place… but what he wanted the most right now was to see his wife and his five-year-old son. He would have taken his chances even in this form. A warm smile found his way into his alien features once the thought of someday telling a heavily censored and adapted version of this adventure to his child, maybe even become an eccentric storyteller for his nephews and scare them to death passed through his mind.

So there they stood: one drowsing, the other babbling and he himself daydreaming with having his life back, completely unaware of everything going on outside their group until one of the spikey dinosaurs – turians, Jacob had called them – with the crest he guessed was something only males had, ebony scales and white facial paint, stood in front of them just outside the translators range and spoke with their weird sounding language. If they used their second vocals the same way the musician used hers, then he was surprised, concerned and a little annoyed. His scent strangely enough gave away nothing, but his pose and the others demeanor told him that he was a leader of sorts, with a higher ranking than the Lieutenant that had saved them if the human's body language was anything to go by.

He couldn't even read the turian own body language because it was pretty evident that his experience with Danielle was going to be useless sorting out her people, but he reeked confidence that much he could tell.

He realized he had lost himself to his own musings when he was brought back to the present by a sharp sound made by the man speaking in front of them, still out of the translators range. Malcolm now had a bored expression, arms crossed and legs apart while he let his gaze wander in the crowd – that now that he thought of it couldn't be more than fifteen people, go figure –; Danielle had stopped talking and had her gaze fixed to the one of her species talking now to a blue woman like Mal and as much of a frown as she could manage with the stiff scales of her brow, her mouth plates flaring wildly to the sides. He focused on the asari and gave a frown of his own when he saw that she was wearing the seemingly universal white and red uniform that screamed medic.

This time when Shepard spoke he heard the words instead of filtering them.

"With all due respect sir, this people need medical aid immediately. They are injured and probably malnourished, they need treatment before trying to pull anything out of their minds about their captors and contacting the Alliance for explanations"

Malcolm stood straight and shout out to the turian.

"You have something to say Spikes them come and say it when we can understand you! I've had enough of decisions made for me to last a lifetime!"

His brain screamed _bad idea_ when the alien actually fixed his gaze on them and walked a few steps until he stood less than two feet from them with his vocals clamped and his scent curious. Then he spoke to them instead of doing so as if they weren't there.

"You are on board the HSV _Conviction_ , actually under the command of myself, Council Spectre Nihlus Kryik. As a matter of galactic security I need to know why humans are targeting alien species and if the Systems Alliance have something to do with it. You will come with me and answer my questions before I leave you to your business while we take you to the Citadel so your Embassies can take care of your travel back home"

Surprisingly enough was Danielle the one who exploded.

"Oh for fucks sake! How many times do we have to tell that we are not aliens, dinosaurs or wherever the hell we seem to be?! We are humans! Humans goddamit! And I won't say a word to you until I see a lawyer and a head doc to try and get across this trauma before I go into a killing spree!"

She had walked until she stood right in front of the male of her species, her mouth plates flaring as wildly as her enraged sub vocals. Her body was taunt with tension, her hands clenched and unclenched, her sharp claws catching the light with every move, her gaze _begging_ to be tried. In that moment despite her words, he couldn't avoid thinking that she looked less human than ever. He stepped next to her.

"If you want our cooperation in whatever operation this is, you have to guarantee our rights and safety first of all. By the UN conventions we are not to say anything if that endangers human standing in a theoretical galactic politics, nor if it endangers ourselves"

Malcolm snapped out of his daze.

"Wait, the UN has rules about alien contact?"

He just shrugged to the best of his ability and proceeded to give his whole attention to the still angry female now giving him her full attention.

"Now listen up you pompous ass, I will not by any means defend those who put us in this hole. I want them in jail, killed if possible. Hell, we could give them a taste of their own medicine for what I care. Human Rights be damned, nobody cared about our own when _we_ were being tortured"

He held his hands in front of him in a pacifying sing and tried to calm her down.

"We can't stop to their level, we are better than that. As soon as our rights are assured we will cooperate with this people and then we are going to go back home. Isn't that good enough? Isn't that all we want?"

Her shoulders slumped and she let her see her guilt and fear in her gaze. Her voice was soft when she spoke.

"I know it, it's just…" she scratched her head with her hands, passing them as she would have had she had hair "I don't know, some part of me just wants revenge, a part of me wants to hunt down the people who did this to us and just…"

She held her clawed hands to her gaze and her sub vocals turned distressed. He grabbed one of her strange hands in his own weird ones and held her gaze.

"I understand. This aliens instincts don't want to let go our enemies but to make sure that they are not there to hurt us anymore. But if we give to them, then we lose our humanity and everything we survived for. If we give up now, it would be the same as if we had stayed in that lab waiting to be put down once they got what they wanted"

In the meantime he hadn't lost sight of the Spectre, who was watching their interaction with a thrill of indecision. Finally he turned to Shepard and spoke.

"Make sure they are healed, dressed and feed in an hour, also fit them with translator implants. I'll see them in the mess hall or in the med bay if there is any problem. As soon as you all have your reports filed I want to talk to you in the comms room"

Before saluting and going his own way, Shepard walked to Malcolm and took his wrist, opening both his and Mal's tech devices interfaces and doing something between them, he smiled and told them he had just given them the translation program. Danielle had gone into a depressed reflexive mood, but at least she didn't seemed to be looking for a fight anymore, and Malcolm was looking bored and detached of the situation. He was the one aware of the aliens surrounding them and the asari with the medical garb guiding them to an elevator. Once they all were inside he could feel what he had been talking about growing stronger: he wasn't lying or trying to comfort her when he said he understand her, his own brand-new alien instincts wanted him to maim and kill everyone in sight until he was back where he belonged, and not even his partners were safe this time. He clamped down on this feral desires with as much hope and determination as he could muster: he would _not_ give in, not when they were so close to be back.

They got out of the elevator after a long ride upwards, and where soon guided to a clean and sterile room with weird beds and machinery. His instincts fought harder, bringing forth memories of what had been done to them, but the suddenly steadying touch of Danielle's warm hand on his arm calmed him once again. She wasn't looking at him, but at the asari doctor with wariness shining in her avian eyes: even when out of them he had been the one to endure more physical damage, she was the one who carried more scars out of the experience, hidden mostly by the dirty bandages across her whole middle. He looked down to check on his own injuries, jut to find out that in the time between being rescued from the fighting pit his cell had been turned into, to standing in this ship medical bay, the bleeding gashes on his back and belly had turned into nothing but shallow scratches and would soon be gone for good.

Under the heavy gazes of three wary aliens, the medic checked their wounds before sending them to take a much needed shower and commanding their caretakers to bring them back to the med bay before they were dressed.

He couldn't start to describe how good the warm water felt on his scaly hide, and for the sudden purr from his friend's sub-vocals she was enjoying it too. He could have laughed at the view of a grumbling Malcolm trying to get the water to a temperature cold enough not to hurt his softer skin. To wash the grime and blood from his body would have been enough, but it was surprising how the simple act of standing under the warm splash of water could take his mind away from the problems as well as it did when he was a human. He sighed, before remembering that he was not in his home in Italy, that he was not going to find his wife downstairs with a warm plate of pasta waiting to ask him sweetly how had been his day at work, nor his son reading a book in his bed, waiting for his father to tuck him in and wish him goodnight.

The three of them covered themselves in soft towels and were guided back to the med-bay. There the asari doctor attended to their physical injuries and gave them some civilian clothes, telling them to get comfortable on them before going through the last tests.

She took blood and some tissue samples, being careful to ask for their explicit consentient before doing something. And besides a few growls and wary stares everything went fine, until she asked for a peek inside their minds.

"It is just for medical proposers, as it is necessary to create a psychological profile for people rescued from slavery or other destructive conditions and give treatment to their problems. I can say, even without the evaluation that all of you will suffer a case of PTSD, but I can help you better if I knew to which degree or had an insight in other possible problems along the way. It does not hurt and everything I find will be kept confidential unless you wish otherwise"

He, being always the diplomatic understood that there was more to it than what had been said, but couldn't think of a good enough reason to avoid the check besides their own lack of thrust in anyone but themselves. He was not expecting the mess that came out of the asari reaching out for Malcolm fist – with the theory that, as a fellow asari, the male would be more receptive to her probing.

She said 'embrace eternity', her eyes turned black and before anyone could say anything she was violently thrown against the other side of the room while their friend sat there with a pensive look in his face. The turians keeping an eye on them were soon on guard and pointing guns at them, until the sari stood.

"Down with the guns, that was not a conscious attack" She then looked straight at Danielle's eyes "It is not a common skill for asari to have, but that is not my theory. May I try mending with your mind, young turian?"

After a low sub-vocal thrill of undefined anger and a moment of hesitation she nodded and the doctor walked and repeated the process she had done with Mal.

Again she was thrown to the other side of the room and by then it was obvious in the soldiers' secondary voices that they didn't know how to manage the situation anymore. When she got up, the asari seemed to look at him for a few seconds and then moved her head in denial. He heard her mutter with his keen ears.

"Two out of three is more than enough" She cleared her throat before speaking in a tone loud enough for anyone to hear "I am done with the physical care, psychologists on the Citadel will take care for your mental health as soon as we dock there". She went to a cabinet in the other side of the room and grabbed some small chips, three bracelets and a gun-looking thing from there before charging the chips. "Now I am going to fit you with a translator chip and a basic tool with the controls"

He growled when she got near them with the charged thing, and as before Malcolm was the first to go. The blue woman fitted the thing behind one of the holes the species had for ears and then replaced the omnitool for the bracelet before turning it on and adjusting a few things. Then there was Dani's turn and then his own. He hadn't realized up until that point that none of them had ears and he didn't know why that made him testy.

"Take them to Spectre Kryik and tell them that his report on their health will be on his terminal at 1800. Also tell Drusus that his old tool will be waiting for him here, along with the visor and gauntlets he forgot in his last visit" she said finally, making their guards laugh in the process and speak words he understood as if they were talking is native Italian.

They were handled clothes fitted for their species: a standard uniform for Dani and Mal, and an undersuit right out of the other krogan's wardrobe, way too big for him. After they got dressed they were taken out of the med bay and to the biggest room they had seen on the upper decks of the ship so far. The room was full of tables fixed to the deck and two different sets of chairs fitted for the most abundant species in the crew. The guards waited for them to choose a table, grabbed some kind of ration packs from some containers nearby and after handing them the food – being specially careful not to mix the turian rations with Malcolm's and his – they left to stand against the wall as immobile as statues. The talked a bit while eating the weird ma

"I tell you, this guys give me the chills when they are all formal and quiet" Mal said while sitting in one of the chairs that seemed suited to humans.

"You tell me? Try to be one of them! If they try to turn me into a stuck-up snob I'll bite their faces off" answered Dani, back to her angry state. He sat himself in one of the chairs, grimacing to her loud sub vocals and the creak the chair gave under his weight.

"Careful there Dan, your teeth are sharp enough now to go ahead with that threat"

And like that the violence was out of her and she was laughing.

"Considering how stiff this skin is my teeth would probably break. Oh, but it would be so satisfying... almost as much as writing a song about it"

"You always with your songs, wasn't there anything else you do with your life" asked the asari in a mock exasperate tone.

The turian gave a smile as devilish as she could with the stiff plates of her face.

"I wrote fanfiction too, maybe instead of a song I'll write a novel with this stuff, the name would be ' _All this Shit is Weird_ '"

"I'll... probably buy it, use it to lit a campfire for my little nephews, then hack your computer and destroy everything you love within it"

She feigned offense while an evil smile appeared in Malcolm's face.

"You wouldn't dare!"

The blue woman gave her a huge diabolic grin.

"Then don't even try to profit on our disgrace girl, at least not without giving us a cut. Otherwise I'll hack you bank accounts too"

She laughed and all of them started to share stories about their families and lives with a freedom they didn't felt since... He couldn't even remember a time in this timeline here he felt as at ease as he was now, and yet he could feel the monsters, both his and Dani's, lurking just beneath the surface, ready to pounce at any time and kill. Even when his injuries were no more phantom pain still prevailed in his sides and the red blood hadn't been thoroughly washed from the skin between his scales nor the underside of the turian claws – he could smell it.

A few minutes had passed since they had finished their meal when Nihlus approached them. The soldiers straightened but he just dismissed them with a simple gesture of his hand and a soft but clear and definitive note in his sub vocals that had his friend looking at him with questions in her eyes and secondary voice.

He sat next to him, whom was on the side opposite to Dani and Mal because he didn't wanted them to feel trapped by his bigger figure, and took one of the rations the woman had left untouched. Both the male turian and he saw the small flicker of her mandibles, quickly suppressed by the female but an instinctive response to a perceived threat that he was sure she wouldn't have had in her human form.

A strange, tired and musical sound was produced by the Spectre sub vocals, and accompanied by a sigh and his three fingered hand going to scratch the spikes on his head he succeeded in conveying frustration to them. That and, if his voice was something to go by, a little speck of pity.

"You are really humans, aren't you?"

They all nodded, thinking there was really nothing they could add, and at that the turian expressed frustration again. This second time Keenan confirmed that the sigh was solely for Malcolm's benefit. The Spectre looked at them with hard eyes.

"I will do my best to investigate what has been done to you, but I will need all of you to train in some disciplines of your current species – or former in Sokolov's case – and to obey the orders the officers give to you. This is a military ship, you can't go gallivanting it like it's a pleasure cruiser"

"Nor would we want to. There could be xenomorphs hidden in the cargo bay and I wouldn't want to cross them…" He had to suppress a laugh at Malcolm's out of place comment.

"It could be worse you know? We could find ourselves face to face with a Warp Core and be forced to accept none of this obeys logic" Added Danielle with a mischievous thrill in both of her voices he had never heard before.

He couldn't tell what was going on in the mind of the turian or if it was angered by the sudden outburst of humor from his friends, but he himself couldn't contain himself from joining the very human hysteria that had finally gotten a hold of the others.

"Perhaps they are working for the Empire and don't want us to know"

The laughs came to an end at his comment and they looked at him with a bland glare, a tacit agreement passing through them in barely a second. Even when they both were still joking – he could _feel_ it, didn't know how bout could – it was unnerving the sudden quietness of the turian, to the point that even her voice was in complete silence since he met her. Malcolm broke the ice again.

"Yeah, about Star Wars… That's not real science fiction"

"What do you mean like that?" God he sounded like the other krogan, - Wrex – when he spoke like that.

They continued for a minute or so debating whether Star Wars was or wasn't science fiction before the forgotten turian called for their attention once again, with a soft chirp of his main voice. He was holding his omnitool open and was moving a few things across its holographic interface before indicating them to open their own. They did, and he transferred them a schedule each with the classes they had to take. Then he stood and told them the soldiers from before would take them to the bunks they were going to take – in the cargo bay despite technically it wasn't allowed because krogans couldn't be housed in common bunks and he guessed they didn't wanted to be apart, a thought they gave thanks to.

After being taken back down and showed to their cots, the soldiers left back to their usual posts and they relaxed in a luckily human-free cargo bay. Wrex was in a corner, dismantling and cleaning his guns, and a few turians and asari, along with a weird slim and tall creature and another one that had a helmet.

They talked about what they had been assigned to study. Malcolm had to learn to control his blue telekinesis and his own mind, Danielle had been assigned to some kind of personal trainers, and himself had been given a meditation course. They all had to learn the basics of their new species and some new languages. He was thankful for the distraction all this things would provide.

All three of them had been told that they could go to Shepard, Alisha, Nero o Wrex if they needed some question answered, and they only had clearance to be in the crew deck or the cargo bay – everything else was off limits unless ordered otherwise. They didn't know how they felt about the rigidity of the military operation they were – kind of – a part of right now, especially Mal, whom had never been in contact with that world besides movies and videogames.

They all chatted for a little bit before their eyelids begun to feel heavy and they went to sleep, with a sense of safety they hadn't felt since being humans.

He woke with a start from a nightmare when he was about to be forced to fight again, this time with his family on the line, only to be soothed by a melody he hadn't heard in his life before.

After a second he realized he knew the voice singing, even though he couldn't quite catch the meaning of the lyrics. Her sub vocals were doing a weird thing, conveying her emotion and creating an undertone that replaced music at the same time. She was sitting a little away from them against the metal wall, her eyes fixed in something that wasn't there and her muscles twitching occasionally, as if she wanted to stand and do something.

He looked at his right and found Malcolm sitting too against the wall, fiddling with his onmitool, typing as fast as he could with one hand and muttering under his breath with his soft voice, his face a mask of cool concentration. Still, he noticed his awakening and acknowledged him with a soft grunt before speaking.

"I can't just sit here and do nothing until we have the classes and with no internet and no music Dani was talking my ear off. If I break this damn code we'll have access to the internet of the ship and will have an insight in how humans fared without our genius minds on this timeline"

He heard the turian change her song to something darker and in English that he was able to understand this time. Something about greed and success. And it seemed it had been this way for a while because the asari complained.

"Oh come on! It's not greed, it's curiosity!"

She then changed to a song about science and the wonder of new discoveries, her sub vocals maintaining the rhythm along with her amusement. Malcolm just cursed with a smile on his lips and he himself felt like laughing. And then a soft sound of success and he heard both his and Dani's tools chirp.

He opened it and found a new icon on the interface, and touching it opened a classic internet browser. Mal's voice came to his ears full of pride.

"I designed a simple browser, similar to the ones we used to use in our time. The current ones I found in the blocked files of the tool are a little bit too complex for you to use efficiently"

Dani stood from her place and came closer to them, sitting back against the wall with her mandibles spread in a scary, all fangs smile.

"Thanks for your thoughts pal" her fingers were quick to press letters and do a search in less time than he would have, and soon enough she found a result that made her smile that scary smile again and her sub vocals purr. "This is whom I was as a human"

From a picture a small woman with deep brown eyes and colored hair, dressed with a short black dress and hugging a handsome man with bright blue eyes, a background of brand logos gave them the tip there was some kind of event going on. She was smiling and seemed truly happy, or perhaps was simply the fact that he had never seen her human smile before. Her sub vocals were now purring with affection and her clawed hand extended to caress the man.

"He's my twin brother, Dashiel the Dashing my mom used to say. He used to play with us but then he enlisted. I was lucky he had leave for my first AMA"

Mal smiled a sly smile while typing on his own tool.

"Well, it's truly a shame you're now a lizard because you're smoking hot babe. Hell, when we're back to our timeline give me a call and I'll date you on the spot!"

She laughed.

"You can't stand my singing for ten minutes, that's not only what I do for a living but my hobby as well. You'll turn mad and kill me or commit suicide before two days have passed"

He smiled a sly smile that even in his mostly feminine face had a tilt that made you think of a male. His voice was low but playful.

"I could find some ways to keep you silent, besides I ain't that tolerable myself. Perhaps we are soulmates and this is something framed by the Lady of Fate herself to tell us that we are meant to be together"

"Or perhaps you are full of bullshit" she said with faked wonder in her voice.

Mal just smiled before turning his tool to them.

"Finally I found a good pic. What do you think now? Hot enough to be a star's date?"

As a human he was tall. His long blonde hair framed his pale face with the bluest eyes he had ever seen on them. His clothes consisted on a shirt and jeans, and the prize on his hands had been one of the most prestigious in the world of informatics and codding. The year was intriguing though – it read 2017.

"You lived as a human until 2017?" he asked, surprised and that piqued the interest of both humans.

The asari looked at him puzzled.

"Yeah, in fact the last day I remember is January 12th of 2018. Why?"

"Last I remember is December 17th, 2013"

They all stayed quiet for a few seconds, and then turned to Dani, whose sub vocals had turned to disbelief and fear.

"August 7th 2016"

Mal stood and started to pace, his eyes nervous and fear pouring out of him.

"So this _thing_ , the project that threatens to destroy our lives spawned across at least a decade? Why? Why would someone take so much time and effort to take us? I doesn't make sense" He turned to him for answers.

He couldn't do more than to try to be the pacificator, as he could feel fury growing in the other man.

"I do not know. All we have to be concentrated about right now it's to get back home to our lives"

"Can we even do that?"

Danielle's small voice, completely devoid of emotion made him turn, feeling despair clutch at his chest and anger growing before her sad eyes. The beast inside of him, fueled by the father, the husband and the brother just wanted to tear her apart for even suggesting he had lost everything. He breathed deeply to calm himself before asking.

"What do you mean?"

She started to pace now, her steps unsteady in her new boots and her hands running through a hairless scalp.

"I don't think this" she said signaling to her non-human body "can be changed. Even if our minds were transferred somehow how do we even know our bodies are still intact? And time travel… My little brother was doing a major in physics, and always that that came up in out chats, his answer was always the same: that traveling backwards in time is impossible and breaks almost every physical law known to men"

Despite her matter of fact tone and her bland sub vocals her eyes were pleading him to prove her wrong. His anger subdued – she was as much of a victim as he and Malcolm were.

He laid before her the facts he knew.

"Perhaps the alien species are the ones who mastered time travel and those humans just stole the technology from them"

She nodded, and a few seconds later Mal started to talk exited.

"The asari doctor before tried to examine our minds in some kind of mind meld, like Vulcans sometimes did in Star Trek. Based in that perhaps our souls were transferred to this bodies as Spock did with his in 'The Wrath of Khan'"

She just laughed at this and seemed more at ease. Then she said in louder voice, distorted by her sub vocal laugh.

"Khan!"

They all laughed hard at that, feeling lighter for a second before the elevator door opened with a loud sucking sound from the hydraulics and the turian Spectre crossed the space between them, one of the slim and tall creatures – that up close had big eyes, horns and funny faces – next to him looking angry. Nihlus stood, and even if he wasn't the tallest, the military knew how to make them all feel like they were being looking down at.

He was calm when he spoke.

"My chief engineer says someone intruded in the ship systems and moved a few lines of code, and the tool signature belongs to one of the oldest models which was given to you. Anything to say on the matter?"

Mal opened his mouth while keeping his funny expression, and he didn't have to be a genius as the man was to know that he planned to refuse outright any involvement of his in the matter. He cleared his throat as good as he could, effectively commanding the asari's eyes to his own and slowly denying with his giant head.

He knew the second they lost this powerful alien trust, they were as good as lost. As a diplomat he had seen many times people try to infiltrate passing as other people. It had been weird in fact that Shepard, being a military man through and through had taken their history at face value – even weirder for Nihlus to do so, whom seemed to be more spy than solder.

Thankfully Malcolm understood good enough his warning and when he finally spoke, he told the truth.

"Sorry to intrude in your systems, but we were bored and I thought hacking a route into internet was way better to die because Danielle couldn't keep her muzzle shut"

"Not a muzzle! Mandibles!" she commented with a bit of embarrassment.

"Whatever…"

He just knew they would have keep bantering had not the big eyed creature interrupted.

"See? No way for them to be humans of old, systems changed too much in two centuries. They lie. They are spies. They…"

The asari's humor changed from amused to angry in a second.

"Hey we are not spies! Your programming is shitty and there is nothing more to say about it! The logic never changes and all I had to do was to learn the language! Every mediocre coder from my time could have broken into your ship's critical systems and make it blow or steal every last bit of information. I didn't so you have anything to call on me for"

The creature would have ranted again, had the turian not spoken.

"At ease Lieutenant Volar, return to your post and await orders" for what he could read in the sub vocals, the man was astounded and amused.

Lt. Volar made a considerable – if not entirely successful – effort to hide his disdain, before saluting with his fist on his chest and leaving with fast strides back to the elevator. The Spectre waited until they all heard the sound of doors closing before he spoke again.

"Is it true? Any human from your timeline could have done what you did?"

Malcolm sighed and slumped a bit, his voice quieter.

"With time yeah. As I said, once you learn the logic the rest is pretty easy, almost instinctive for some. They could but… not in the time I did it. It would have taken a few days, perhaps a whole week for a hacker to fully understand your code, and more than that to start to elucidate a way to crack it"

"Then why were you able to do it in a few hours?" again his sub vocals were plain there were Dani's ones were a rush of emotion, the sharper of them all being fear.

His friend looked more and more nervous by the second, and this time his tone was a little defensive.

"I am what humans call a 'genius child', I learned to do things faster and better than other kids. I am able to process data at a higher speed too, so I guess that's why I deciphered your code in little more than an hour"

The spectre nodded and opened his omnitool, looking through some lines there.

"That's just about right with the data I got on you. Malcolm Richards, born December 12th 1989, learned to code from an early age, graduated as Licentiate in Systems with specialization in security on 2002 and started to work for the government and private projects as soon as he was of legal age, meanwhile he sold new firewalls to all the important computer systems designers out there through his parents. Was put in cryogenic conservation still alive after a night of excess left him in a deep coma with some brain function compromised, in theory until they found a way to save him"

The asari snickered and his anger grew in his voice with every word.

"That's what they told my family? That I had almost killed myself? They know me! I may indulge once in a while but I'm far too paranoid to drink that much!"

He put his hand on his friend's shoulder in a show of support, but he was far too angry and sad to care.

"Is that data correct? It could be all fabrications for all we know if it was in the enemy's server"

Said Danielle with serious tone and expression, and she may not have noticed, but he was a little worried that she had referred to fellow humans as enemies. That was what wars were made of: resentment and fear. Could she go back to her normal life once back in their timeline or she would hunt those responsible of them almost losing it all? Or perhaps was something that came out of her alien body instinct – God knew he was being affected by being a krogan – and he was overthinking it.

Her fellow turian nodded.

"We checked everything that was public and many things that are kept in old Alliance servers for historical purposes"

He made the question that mattered the most.

"Do you know how they took us? How we can go back to our lives?"

He knew the answer from the second a soft sadness made his way to the male turian sub vocals, and he knew Danielle heard it too because her own turned almost desperate. He felt his chest constrict before the news that they were about to hear.

"As I said, you were put in cryogenic suspension, not brought here by the grace of some time machinery. Those almost two hundred years passed. And as you well know, there is no way to turn back time"

He knew it for sure now.

His chest felt empty yet burning at the same time, as from afar he heard Malcolm's air leaving his lungs entirely and Danielle's completely inhuman cry to the skies, but he couldn't concentrate on them. All he could see was his son face before he had gone out that day, asking him for a promise of telling him a tale to sleep that night. Anne's face, full of happiness before kissing him goodbye and wishing him a good day.

He heard the other krogan coming from the other side of the bay, surely ready to contain him if his anger won but it wouldn't be necessary.

It didn't mattered to him anymore.

He fell limp to the ground, his giant eyes filling with tears.

 _Gone._

They were gone now and he would never see them again. He would never watch his son grow to be a man, he would never wrinkle beside his wife, he would never meet his friends again, nor his siblings or his mother. All of them were long gone now, and here he was: a carcass of whom had once been Keenan Sokolov.

The sorrow was something physical now, a weight in his heart that wouldn't allow him to go one day without thinking of what he had lost – but that same sorrow was what grounded him. He still had people who depended on him – Danielle and Malcolm would never make it on their own in this wild new world, they would get themselves killed in a few hours after his own demise if that wasn't what they were planning already. He couldn't abandon them, his conscious – nor Anne's sweet memory – would ever let him.

Yet he needed time alone to rebuild himself, to think of what to do now – how to carry on as she would have wished without making him feel as if he was betraying himself by doing so. He almost didn't heard Nihlus very uncomfortable voice adding something to the bomb he had just dropped.

"Those who put you in cryo asked your families and friends to periodically record some messages for you. I have transferred each data pack to you tools"

And without further ado he just nodded to Wrex and went back to the elevator, while the other krogan just shot him a confused look before walking back to his place of the cargo bay.

Malcolm had already put his hands to work on his onmitool and three feminine voices – one of an adult and two of children – were speaking in a clear English, making him smile fondly. He couldn't ask yet, his own pain too raw. Danielle had yet to move her hands away from her eyesight, her sub vocals were a jumble of emotions, all of them negative. He couldn't try and identify them, afraid of what the younger woman might be thinking.

He put his weird three fingered hands to work on his own onmitool, trying hard not to think of, not _to see_ his old human hands, trying even harder not to think that this was his life and his body now. A folder with video files opened before him ordered by date and he started with the first one right away.

Her face took most of the space the small holographic screen had, her colors mingled with the orange of the interface but he knew them by heart: her long honey hair, her forest green eyes and her tanned skin. She had been crying, her eyes puffy and tear tracks running through her cheeks, but for him she was a beautiful as ever. Her voice was trembling and sad when she spoke in their shared Italian.

"I… I still can't believe this is happening. You were here yesterday and now… The doctors say they can't save you with the current technology, that they'll put you in cryo and try their chances when the technology allows it. Still, I don't know if I'll ever see you again – the mere thought is horrible!"

He heard a soft cry in the background, and the video cut for a moment before she returned with new tears in her eyes.

"Sorry, Gav is not taking it well. He says you broke your promise" he was crying with her now, at her broken voice and defeated tone. "And… I wanted to wait to our date on Saturday but, I don't know if you'll ever have the chance to see me again so… I'm pregnant. In six months more you would have been a father again – maybe even the girl we wanted so much" his fury reappeared, but he tampered it down, this wasn't the moment for that.

She made a pause and then her hands got to the sides of the camera, as if she was trying to reach to him through the video.

"I know this is madness but… If for some way of fate you are hearing me right now, fight! Come back to us! We need you, I need you Kenny…"

He paused the video.

He couldn't do this, not if he wanted to be sane the next morning and not have the blood of his allies in his alien hands. Behind his closed eyes he could see the future he had lost for decisions he wasn't made part of. His chest ached for all that, for the simple pleasures of life he had been stolen.

He looked in the files for some picture of the whole family he had lost, and finally found it: Anne was in a field, holding by the hand a twelve-year-old Gavril if the note was accurate, and six-year-old Allen. He kept looking at it while laying down on his cot, tear blurring his gaze again.

That night cycle he slept dreaming of him being there for them, of the life he lost. And when he woke the next morning a part of him had stayed behind in that dream, another died a little while he finished watching the videos and by the call to his first meditation class he was not the same man whom had woken in a cell a few days ago, nor the same whom had been put in cryo after a car accident.

And he had understood that there was no way back – he just had to keep moving forward.


End file.
